


Half a World Away

by divingforstones



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Angst, Fever, First Kiss, First Time, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, M/M, No S8 Spoilers, Post S7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-19 20:05:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2401235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divingforstones/pseuds/divingforstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There’s that feeling of losing James, somehow, building even before he left, and now all of a sudden sharpening into something undeniable, like it’s been a premonition after all.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to wendymr for beta'ing all of this so thoroughly, so supportively and with such very helpful insights.
> 
> This is very angsty for both of them - I do promise to sort them out in the end.

**Half a World Away**

_August._

 

“Well, here’s a sight for sore eyes,” teases Robbie, as James, pint glass in hand, slides into the booth beside him. James grimaces back at him and murmurs some excuse about tutoring, which seems aimed at either his slight tardiness this evening or his lack of availability in general recently.

“Ignore him, James,” Laura advises. “Not all of us are gentlemen of leisure now. Some of us still have to earn a living.”

Robbie wasn’t quite joking, though. It’s good to set eyes on James properly. Seems like it’s been ages. He grins at him now. “And what have you been doing with yourself over the last couple of weeks, then?”

He only attends to James’s response with half an ear as his mind starts to nudge around what James is saying—because this Teaching English as a Foreign Language Course is all very well, Robbie supposes, and it’ll bring in another strand of students for James’s private tutoring—but he can’t really have built up enough of them to prevent him having to dip into savings that Robbie suspects can’t be that much of a buffer—and then he catches the words _contract overseas_ and he tunes right back in in a hurry.

It’s wholly unexpected. James might have been around a fair bit less recently—but that had been temporary, of course, that was him trying to find his way after leaving the force. That wasn’t this. Overseas. Did he just say—Thailand?

Robbie sets down his glass sharply. “Why the—”

“Thought it might be good to get away for a bit.” James cuts him off. And he dips his head to his pint glass.

Robbie, not deterred in the slightest, raises his eyebrows at the top of that bent head and opens his mouth again, but falters, his attention forcibly diverted towards Laura by the unexpected intensity of her gaze turned straight on him.

In the long years before their relationship, throughout its surprisingly brief duration, and now, as they’re re-establishing their own brand of straightforward friendship in the aftermath—there’s no-one who can match Laura for how much she can get into one glance. It throws Robbie further, which is enough to give her a chance to cut in first, and give James an entirely different reaction than Robbie had been about to deliver.

“That _does_ sound different, James, very interesting. Tell us—”

And James, his eyes settling on her, starts to tell them both. About a language school in Bangkok—Bloody hell, _Bangkok_ —and three-month contracts and all Robbie is required to do is make the right noises in the right places, because expressing his thoughts on this matter is, for some currently unestablished reason known only quite strongly to Laura, not the right thing to do here. And then he’s getting further looks from her, since apparently his half-hearted attempts at enthusiasm are not enough either. He bides his time, not all that patiently, to get her on her own for a moment.

But Laura cheerfully informs him that he can get the next round in.

And then he glances back after ordering and sees the two of them, immersed in a far more intense discussion than they’d had time to work up to since he’d left the table. Laura is leaning forward, gesturing, at her most persuasive. And it isn’t working on James, who has straightened into full defensiveness, his height and sideways glance being used effectively to evade whatever she’s trying to say.

Then James, sensing his gaze, glances over at Robbie and his face smooths over as he turns back to Laura, who stops talking. And when Robbie returns they’re discussing vaccinations. Which isn’t something he can contribute much to. Laura is advising, still being kindly practical. She’s been quite gentle with James recently, every time they meet. And Laura is here every time James manages to fit in a pint, these days. It’s just like James, really—loyal to a fault. Making time to do Robbie a favour and help him out as Robbie gets his friendship with Laura back on a secure footing. Prioritising that. Agreeing obligingly to a pint under that pretext even if his schedule has left him rather too busy to meet Robbie on his own at other times. Although James is fond of Laura too, of course, and wouldn’t want to lose touch with her either.

Robbie thinks Laura’s own concern for James all stems from how taken aback she’d been when he’d told her how his sergeant was resigning, abruptly and with no further plans. He and Laura had still been together then. She’d been worse than Innocent about it in some ways—and Innocent had certainly tried her utmost to get Robbie to persuade James into any other option than leaving the force entirely. Not that Robbie had given that idea the time of day. Once he’d grasped that James really meant what he said, he’d had to acknowledge that this might have been coming for a while. And that his urgency about seeing James sorted when his own plans for retirement had begun to take shape—pushing James towards the vacancy he’d create as some sort of solution—that might have been partly prompted by a growing anxiety about the lad.

Laura had seemed to share that worry—talking about James being burnt out and how a period of stress-related absence would have been a better option for him to get back on his feet without burning his bridges. You’d think she’d understand why this idea of James leaving now just—isn’t advisable. Maybe she feels this plan to teach overseas is a good compromise, a way to get some perspective. But still—why would he need to leave Oxford? Most folk he knows are here, aren’t they? It feels wrong. Regardless of how it makes some sort of sense when James and Laura are talking, and seems to be forming into some sort of done deal.

And finally, it’s James’s round and he’s rising from the table _._ But he’s barely negotiated his way around the nearest set of happy Friday evening punters and out of earshot when Laura is turning to Robbie, also with something to say. “Hope you’re going to take him out for a goodbye pint without me here too?”

“I—why are you asking me that?” A goodbye pint. It wasn’t that long since they’d fitted in a pint when James had gone off to Kosovo. When James was still his sergeant and he’d seemed to have a better hold of him. This last couple of months—it all seems to be moving rather fast for Robbie now.

“Because he’d like that. It might—help.”

“He doesn’t need any help to go. He’s fairly made up his mind, hasn’t he? Don’t know what he needs to go that far for,” grumbles Robbie, all the unsettling disgruntlement at these sudden developments rising to the surface now. “There’s enough English language schools in Oxford.”

“I sincerely doubt that that’s why he did the course. And maybe he does need—to go that far.”

“What? Why would he?” But Adam Tibbit is in Robbie’s mind now and James’s footsteps coming to a halt on a bridge. _I need a change._

“I don’t know, you tell me,” Laura says. He stares at her. “Look, Robbie.” She’s not looking at him now. She’s looking at James, who’s leaning both elbows on the bar, one foot up on the brass foot rail, looking ridiculously young again in that hoodie in the way he still tends to in odd moments when he’s in casual clothes and as slouched down as ever. “Either be more supportive and let him go, or ask him not to.”

“Ask him not to go? He’s not me sergeant any more.” Laura rolls her eyes at him. “I’ve no right to ask him not to go anywhere _._ ” _Even if I don’t much like it._

“Well, then,” Laura says, matter-of-factly. “If that’s your decision, be a bit less bloody grudging about it.”

Robbie sends her a look. It’s all he has time to do because James is turning, balancing three pints in a careful triangle between his long fingers. None of this was his decision. Only one thing is, as it turns out.

 

_===_

 

“How’re all these overseas arrangements, then? You still all set to go?”

“Mmm.” James contemplates the beer in his glass as if Newcastle Brown is a new and interesting vintage to him. Which would be another frustrating reminder of how he hasn’t been round in a while if he wasn’t so obviously sending signals to Robbie to drop this. But there’s something needling at Robbie about this over the past couple of weeks and now he’s finally managed to get James over for an evening, back on his couch. And seeing as Laura isn’t here to glare at him…

And Robbie starts to push gently at him. “It all just seems a bit quick—I mean, don’t you need a visa—”

“The language school over there is sorting it—they seem very efficient. I can get a business visa for three months and then they can apply for a work permit and the visa can be continuously extended to cover my contract—”

 _Hold on._ “But you said your contract was just for the three months.”

“Yeah, three months. With the option of a longer contract renewal if I do well.”

“Of course you’ll do well,” says Robbie but it comes out more resigned than he’d intended. Why does it feel oddly like James doesn’t really plan on coming back?

James sends him a glance. “Look, I know you don’t think much of this whole idea—”

Oh, bugger. And Robbie is torn. He hadn’t really meant to pour cold water on James’s plans either. Maybe Laura’s right. God knows, he can see, looking back now _,_ how James had looked those last few months in the job wasn’t right—and that look, that quietly desperate look, it’s just not lifted like it should have. And Adam Tibbit is in Robbie’s head again and how Robbie had failed to see just how badly James was distressed at the time. Until James had made it very clear by coming to that abrupt decision to resign that hadn’t really been so abrupt if Robbie had let himself see the clues in the time coming up to it. Maybe this is right for James. Maybe Robbie is just far too bloody used to having him around and he’s being selfish. He doesn’t know what to say now. And James is grimacing, digging for a phone that must be buzzing in his pocket.

“Estate agent,” he explains, examining a text. “Any chance you could drop the keys in? My flight’s on a Sunday, next Sunday, so I can’t…”

“But you’re not giving up your flat? I thought you said you were subletting it? Unofficially, like?”

“No. I had to give notice on my lease. I was going to sublet it, though—until it fell through. To one of the guys in the band, as it happens.”

“Shelley?” says Robbie stupidly, automatically, utterly distracted by this blow. Because it feels like a blow.

“I—what?” James is staring at him. Then he seems to take in that Robbie  genuinely doesn’t understand what he’s said, even if he doesn’t see why. “No, _my_ band, the one I was in. Our cello player. And he’s definitely not called Shelley. He goes by the name of Jim.”

“I used to call you that,” Robbie says. “You didn’t like it and you never said.” He wants to get up and leave the room. He just wants to walk out and be on his own at the sudden memory of James back at the start of their years together. Their years that, just at this moment, really seem to be approaching some sort of an end. He doesn’t know what the hell is wrong with him. He pushes himself back more firmly on the couch and forces himself to stay sitting.

“No, I—It was just that I didn’t like the nickname. I didn’t mind you having a name for me. I just didn’t like the name itself.”  James is frowning at him now. Robbie makes an effort to pull himself together.

“So if you’re giving up your flat, then, what are you going to do with all your stuff?”

“Hiring a storage unit—”

“No, you don’t. You can shove it all in the spare room.”

“You need your spare room for when Lyn visits.”

“No.” Robbie finds himself using his best, implacable, and-that’s-an-order-sergeant voice, hoping it still works on James. “You’ll leave your things here. _”_

“ _Sir,"_ James concedes, smartly, immediately identifying the tone. And follows that with a reluctant grin.

 

===

 

But he does give in and leave his stuff there. He even sees sense about staying in Robbie's, in that reassuring room of boxes, the night before he leaves. Well, he’s slept in there enough times over the years when they’ve exhausted themselves late into the night tossing ideas back and forth on a case or just when he’s a couple of beers the worse for wear. Robbie waves off his thanks for it— _you can make me me breakfast one more time before you leave._ And then doesn’t hold him to that, of course. He’s not having any of this healthy nonsense that passes for breakfast with James. Might as well get one last proper full English into the lad before he goes. He’s that bit too thin recently.

Breakfast seems to be over and done with fairly fast that morning, with the restless feel of a travel deadline fast approaching, and then it’s time to leave for Heathrow. And Robbie giving him a lift there is something else that James had initially resisted and then just yielded to. He doesn’t seem to have much argument to him at the moment. Which is vaguely worrying in itself. But at least it means Robbie can see him off properly.

And they’re outside packing Robbie’s car with what James is taking when Robbie realises that the reason why both rucksack and wheeled case are being carefully adjusted as buffers in his boot is because—he’s bringing the guitar? Robbie had seen that carefully stowed, or so he’d thought, in his spare room, safely ensconced until James came back to claim it, and now it turns out it was just in there overnight. Turns out he’s taking it.

“You sure you—” Well, of course he is. The golden rule. Never let your instrument out of your sight. It’s just—“You sure you’ve got everything?”

Does the rest of what he’s leaving behind in Oxford matter enough to him? He’d better not contact Robbie when those three months are up and tell him he’s hired a storage unit and has some band mate doing him a favour and coming round to shift those boxes…And there’s a growing feeling of urgency to do or say something about all this if Robbie could only work out what that was.

It feels like they must have taken a wrong turn somehow, during all those years, for this to be happening. It doesn’t feel right. James going away like this, so open-ended, and he's not even sure James wants this, he seems almost apathetic, as if he’s just resigned to it. Like he's sending himself away, instead of wanting to go.

And yet as he manoeuvres the car out onto the road, he thinks of what Laura had said recently when he’d had a go at getting her around to his point of view. “I seem to recall you going away. When it was all too much for you.”

He’d looked at her, taken aback. “That was because—”

She’d reached for his hand. “God, I know, Robbie, of course I do. You know that. I don’t mean to draw a parallel, exactly. Just—people do leave sometimes for all sorts of reasons that maybe they can’t even articulate. When it’s too hard to stay. And like you said, when you came back, it was a start.”

Time ticks inexorably by through the slightly constrained, distracted conversation of the car drive, the hassled distraction of parking and James’s check-in without Robbie finding some way to—well, it’s a bit bloody late to express any reservations about this now, isn’t it?

And then right in front of the security gate, at the very last moment, James is in his arms, and he doesn’t even know who’s initiated that.

But it doesn’t feel comfortable. Ridiculously, because James has always so easily, comfortably, fitted himself straight into Robbie; leaning against him on benches, relaxing against him on couches, such a constant close presence during all those years as his sergeant, right at Robbie’s shoulder. But they don’t actually hug and this is awkward and one-armed on James’s part, because of the precious guitar travelling as hand-luggage. He seems almost stiff in Robbie’s brief embrace. Attempt at an embrace. And the light touch of his arm around Robbie makes him seem barely there. What it does feel like, though, is a goodbye.

And then there’s a quick, small smile at Robbie, with James’s eyes just not quite meeting Robbie's rather narrowed, discerning gaze, and he’s gone.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

_October_

 

“Mr Robert Lewis?” The words fall carefully down the phone line, pronounced with the different emphases that tell Robbie his name is wholly unfamiliar to the caller. He barely gets a moment to process that before—“You are the emergency contact for Mr James—Mr James Hathaway? I want to inform you that he has been taken seriously ill.”

James.

“He was taken ill this evening and has been taken to hospital, to a clinic near our school—”

 _But it’s not evening yet,_ Robbie wants to object—ambushed in his kitchen, staring out his window at a shaft of early afternoon autumn sunlight touching the drift of dry leaves that’s gathered against his garden wall. As if he can somehow intervene and stop this before it happens.

“I am Miss Chon, an administrator at our school. You are Mr Robert Lewis?”

“Yes, of course, yeah. I—did you say I was his emergency contact?” That’s the wrong question. He can’t seem to make his brain kick into gear here.

“Yes. I remember when I took his details. At first he asked was it necessary. I explained it was our procedure. He said that ‘this far away, I might as well indulge myself.’ I asked him the meaning of indulge, in this context. He explained he meant it was a comfort he should not permit himself.”

_James._

“He often says something original and then he is kind about explaining it. Patient.”

“Yeah, he would be,” Robbie manages. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes briefly against the ordinary, untouched world outside his window and tries to focus. “Where did you say they took him to?”

She has the name and contact details. He writes it all down, thankful when she spells the unfamiliar words and that she repeats the whole when she’s done. She offers what reassurance she seems to be able to come up with, adding that if the situation was very bad then James would have been taken to a bigger hospital by the ambulance workers instead of this international clinic that all their foreign teachers are registered at—which sounds like a small hospital to Robbie, the way she describes it anyway. And he can’t quite make his mind get past the word _ambulance._

“Would you happen to know the code for me to dial from the UK?” She does, of course, well used to giving it to prospective teachers, as his brain continues to reason automatically, on an irrelevant, more logical track. Separate from the one that won’t stop saying _James._

Once he’s ended the call—after thanking her, he’ll later hope—he stands in his kitchen and finds the hand that was holding the phone has released it onto the countertop, which he leans against for a moment. The sunlight continues to spread agreeably across the base of Robbie’s garden wall. The leaves swirl a little, some of them extracting themselves from the pile as a reminder of a mundane task that’ll need to be carried out. The kitchen clock ticks away, audible only when you stand still and silent but quite loud right now. And somewhere, half a world and several timezones away—There’s that feeling of losing James, somehow, building even before he left, and now all of a sudden sharpening into something undeniable, like it’s been a premonition after all.

He tries to hold on to this hospital-clinic distinction which makes no sense to him. He tries to replay the words, but can only hear the careful, serious tone. She’d obviously wanted to be reassuring but was prevented from offering much by an honest lack of information. She didn’t know what was wrong with James. And she might be the most efficient person he’s encountered since he’d retired from Innocent’s jurisdiction and her English might be so good that even Morse would have trouble finding fault with it, but he still needs to hear that James is going to be okay from the mouth of an expert. So he reaches for the phone again and goes straight to his own source. “Laura? Need you to do something for me—”

 

===

 

“Okay, Robbie, look. This is not as bad as it may sound. He did collapse but he seems to be in good hands now. I spoke to one of the doctors—” She’s working up to telling him something. “—and they suspect it’s malaria. But he’s not in any real danger—it’s most likely one of the better strains to have—benign malaria, Robbie, if you like.” _Benign malaria?_ “Which God only knows how he’s managed to catch—but you can dehydrate very fast in that heat. They think that between that and the fever he collapsed and they want to keep him in on an IV and keep him monitored—”

“Did you talk to him?” He really wants to know that she did. He wants James to have had Laura’s own brand of matter-of-fact, teasing comfort over the phone. That would reach him, ground him, reassure him that there’s people here thinking of him. He’d like that, hearing from her. And she’d tell him that Robbie had got her to call, of course she would—

“No, Robbie. I couldn’t. From what they said, he’s still pretty out of it.”

And that’s the tipping point. It kicks off a memory in Robbie’s head, her unfortunate choice of words. Of a younger James, pretty out of it in a hospital bed, and Robbie waiting for him to wake. Battling down those memories of the heat and the smoke and the fear of the whole place going up before he got him out. And trying to get past that nightmarish image of his sergeant, lying unresponsive on a bed like a funeral pyre in the midst of it all. Not quite fighting to save himself.

And he really can’t quite take the thought of James that ill and vulnerable now, amongst strangers. He’d hate that.

“I’ll call again tomorrow, Robbie, and find out how he’s doing, they seemed perfectly willing to update me when I said I was ringing on your behalf—” Laura is continuing, reasonable and reassuring.

“No,” Robbie says abruptly. “Well—aye, do, please, but I’m going over there anyway.”

“You’re—what?”

Robbie says nothing. He reckons she heard him, all right. And the separate tracks in his brain thankfully begin to converge again. He feels sharper and more certain than he has since he and James left the force. It’s like the feeling he used to get when a case started to gather momentum and they’d known exactly what direction to move in, and at what pace.

Laura is staying silent at the other end of the line.

“You still there?”

She makes an oddly frustrated noise. “Look, I know you got a shock, Robbie, I do know, but there’s no need to—”

“Who else is going to go to him? There’s no-one else—”

“But he’s really not going to want you to come on that basis, is he? Robbie—look—meet me for coffee tomorrow morning? Call into me around eleven. We can talk about it then—”

Suits Robbie, he’ll be in at the travel agency earlier than that anyway.

 

===

 

“Tomorrow? Don’t you need a visa?” Laura, who’d been unable to wangle enough of a break into her schedule to go any further afield for that coffee, is frowning across the hospital canteen table at Robbie. “You can’t have yours arranged like James—”

“No, you can get a tourist one on arrival in the airport there.”

“Oh.” She doesn’t look too enamoured by this good news, which had come as a relief to Robbie in the travel agency after the thought had belatedly occurred to him this morning. He hadn’t trusted his online skills to arrange something like this. Laura had told him as soon as he’d arrived that she’d already been on to the clinic this morning and that James “hadn’t had the best night.” Which wasn’t great, taken in the context of Laura’s understated honesty when it comes to medical matters. And yet she obviously still has reservations about Robbie doing this. So has Lyn. Robbie had already gone one round of this with her on the phone last night.

 _“What?_ Dad—why?” She’d been readily sympathetic for James, who she’s always liked, right up until Robbie informed her of his plan.

Robbie had gone for the easy option. “You keep saying that I should get away for a bit, pet. That you’d love to escape to a bit of winter sun if you weren’t in work.”

“I meant somewhere like Spain, Dad,” she’d said, still sounding startled.

“Well—this’ll likely be a bit more interesting than Spain.” Not that Robbie cares much where he’s headed at this stage—although this would all have been a bit easier if James hadn’t felt the need to take himself off quite so far. And that hadn’t pacified Lyn much.

And now Laura’s failure to see why this is necessary, combined with a certain frustrating inability to explain it himself—it’s making him dig his heels in all the harder. James would understand. Will understand. Won’t he?

Then again, Laura’s support for James on this has extended to not being very understanding any time Robbie has grumbled about the irksome lack of James around Oxford over the past couple of months. She’s tended to look rather impatient and point out that it was probably all harder on James. And maybe James was having more trouble adjusting to life over there than he made out. It’s been hard to tell from his emails. But all those lengthy accounts from him have certainly captured Robbie’s curiosity and amused him over the past while. It’s been like reading some sort of illustrated travelogue all made for Robbie, written like James was just talking straight to him—all the little anecdotes and vivid descriptions of the way of life as James, quietly observing, and with his eye for telling details and his wry take on events, had begun to settle into a rather different world.

Presumably he’d begun to settle in. That was the rub. There was never anything about how James was doing himself. Awkward questions from Robbie in his own, far more mundane emails, aimed at establishing that—they’ve tended to go unanswered. Even the odd text— _How are things over there?—_ that Robbie had taken to sending, just receives a wry little amusing comment in reply. Not miles away from how James would have responded to that sort of query anyway, but it’s different not having him right here, so you can read a bit more than he means you to from the look of him even as he evades your concern.

“It’s just _odd_ that he’s managed to catch malaria,” Laura is saying now. “In Bangkok?”

“Oh, he went hiking when he got there before the term started at his school—trekking, he called it. The place names—I don’t remember but it was near the border—” _And he disappeared off the radar for a while and I didn’t much like that either._

He’d been aware of an increasingly dispirited feel to his days when he knew that checking his email, the daily pleasure it had become, was rather pointless. He obviously needs to find something more to do with his time. Apparently there’s something in this idea that filling it with various activities actually isn’t enough if they aren’t “personally fulfilling” ones. Not that Robbie wants to acknowledge that there had been any grain of truth in that ruddy annoying how-to-retire guide, as he’d mentally dubbed the series of pamphlets that Innocent had foisted upon him once she’d come to accept that he was really leaving.

But the last couple of months—they’ve just been dissatisfying. And those emails had been some sort of substitute for having James opposite you across a pub table, keeping you agreeably company, gently mocking you and somehow lifting your spirits in the process.

They’d been a relief. Robbie hadn’t realised quite how badly he’d felt over the way they'd left things until that first one had popped up in his inbox. It’d felt like James was offering some sort of welcome olive branch from a quarrel they’d never actually had.

Laura’s face is clearing now as some medical puzzle starts to make more sense to her. “Oh, yes, he _did_ say. That’s probably where he contracted it—and the incubation period would make some sense, I suppose, if he’d been taking antimalarials—they don’t actually make you immune, Robbie, but they—”

“He emails you,” says Robbie flatly. She hadn’t said before.

“Sometimes, yeah. What—”

“Nothing.” _Are they the same as the ones he sends to me?_ he wants to ask, _my emails, are they like a copy-all-contacts thing?_ He’d never thought of them being a general thing. Maybe James just adds in the odd comment to personalise them before he sends the same diary to everyone.

Laura gives him a reminiscent grin now. “They’re good, aren’t they? I mean—short but sarcastic. Pithy. James could always get his messages across in a few words. They’re very funny sometimes. Oh, tell him I still want some pictures, though.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen—” Not general, then. Robbie picks up his cup to hide his ridiculous pleasure.

When he returns his focus to Laura, her face is falling back into sombreness again. “But, Robbie—have you thought about why you’re going? James won’t expect you to, you know that.”

She’s right about that, he has to acknowledge, and it makes a familiar feeling of frustration rise in him, the same way it tends to whenever he gets a blunt reminder of how James still never really expects anything from you despite all he does for you. Never has done. _You saved me._ As if you’d have left him to—

Laura is gazing at him, waiting. Robbie wishes he could fall back on that very convenient “He’s me sergeant.” It was a handy way of shutting down all queries and comments over the years. Even the odd queries that had occasionally raised themselves in Robbie’s own head. “He’s a mate,” he tries instead. It does sound a bit inadequate.

“We’re friends—if it was me, would you be dropping everything and heading off?”

“No,” says Robbie immediately, truthfully. Then he’s horrified, backtracking. “I mean, if you were seriously ill and you’d asked, you’d wanted me to, that’d be different, of course—” But she’s not insulted. Too focussed on making her point, it seems.

“Same,” she says distractedly. “Although I would be on the next plane regardless of whether it was serious or not, whether he was asking or not, if it were Franco. Just because he was taken ill.”

“Well, obviously,” says Robbie, astonished. “Bit different that. He’s your partner.” Franco had finally taken that transfer back to Oxford, recently enough. Things certainly seem to be developing rather well between him and Laura, this time around. He does wonder if Franco had been waiting in the wings for a while and had felt the way was clear for him to try and win Laura back when her relationship with Robbie was finally off the table. It’s not something he’s probed the ins and outs of. He trusts Laura too much to think she’d have given their try at a relationship anything but her best shot. And he’s right glad for her now. Because somehow it’s always felt as if Robbie was the one who hadn’t made their relationship quite work when it seemed like it should have.

“So why…” She trails off and looks at him expectedly.

Robbie’s getting ruddy tired of trying to explain this. What’s the alternative? Just leave James to his own devices when he’s that ill? Just wouldn’t be right to, would it? And, as it turns out, when it comes right down to it—Robbie just can’t.

Laura starts to pokes the tip of her wooden stirrer into the foam on her cooling, untouched cappuccino. Robbie is distracted by the gesture. And by wondering why she’s not drinking her coffee. She sounds equally distracted. “Robbie—if you fly halfway across the world, James might think—” She comes to a halt, seems to change her mind and starts again. “Do you think it’s fair— ” And she stops again. “It’ll just raise his—”

“—his spirits.” Robbie supplies rather impatiently when she stops completely. “Well, hopefully, yeah.” Breaking off her sentences, indecisively. Not like her. He smiles at her, fondly now. “And you’re more worried about James than you’re letting on, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she says.

He feels a jolt of alarm. “But he’s not more seriously ill than you’re saying?”

“No,” she says slowly, “no.”

“All right,” he says, reassured.

 

===

 

_October in Bangkok_

 

Robbie had forgotten what it felt like, that wall of warmth that claims you as soon as you step outside in the tropics. And the way that day seems to shadow rapidly into darkness without a pause for that hesitation of dusk. Although this is certainly different from the British Virgin Islands. The city seems just as purposefully chaotic as it had been a little while before when his taxi had battled here through that traffic from the airport, but now it’s invested with a different kind of urgency as people embark on the next part of their day.

James had said that he taught at night, hadn’t he? That most of his students came after full days in universities to study at English language schools. It’s a relief to finally be in the place where he is, right in the midst of all this weaving night time chaos that he’s described. And in the end it proves thankfully easy, these last obstacles to reaching him dissolving, as a taxi extracts itself from that slowly moving mass of taillights and is drawn to Robbie where he stands on the street outside his hotel, taking his bearings. And the driver nods in recognition at the address that Robbie shows to him.

It’s even surprisingly easy to get in to the clinic, which isn’t too far from Robbie’s hotel, just as the travel agent back in Oxford had promised. There are no visiting-hour restrictions, it’s more like a twenty-four hour emergency walk-in clinic from what Robbie can see, all calmly controlled activity downstairs, and with just a few rooms for inpatients in the quieter part upstairs. There’s simply a welcome acceptance that he’s here to see his friend.

Robbie takes in, as he follows the young nurse upstairs, that it’s cool, blissfully so, and modern, and then that the short corridor that those inpatient rooms open from is incredibly clean—and then they’re stopping at the door of one fairly spacious white room and he’s being told not to stay too long and that the patient is sleeping but if he wishes he can leave a note—Robbie stops listening. Because James is patchily flushed, apparent even from here, propped up on white pillows and maybe it’s that, the way he’s collapsed back that’s making him look so ill.

The nurse’s footfall retreats and there’s only the hum of the air-conditioning left as Robbie is drawn in, further into the room and over to him. Because the patient is not asleep. They seem to have disturbed him. James rolls his head slightly on the pillow. Robbie makes his way around to the side of the bed that’s uncluttered by the IV stand to lean over him and he watches as James’s eyes start to blink open. James peers up at him, frowning, his gaze not quite focused. Robbie bends over a little more, his eyes on James’s face. He sees the second that recognition hits.

And then James reaches up both arms and grasps him, pulling him down, holding on, fisting his hands into the material at the back of Robbie’s shirt. Robbie is taken by surprise. His back is protesting, hard. But James is warm, very warm against him and he smells like his own indefinable James scent under something antiseptic and Robbie has missed him that much, he suddenly lets himself fully feel just how much he’s missed him. He gets his arms around him in a more gentle hug. James’s breath is a bit ragged against his neck.

And then Robbie is holding on with just as fierce a grip as James’s, getting his arms further round him and pulling him in tighter, forgetting his back and the need to be careful of James, overwhelmed by a surge of protectiveness. Because all of Laura’s half sentences are swirling around his head, completed in Robbie’s own words. If you fly halfway across the world, he might think—that means something else. Do you think it’s fair—to do that to him. It might raise his—hopes.

And as James presses his head into Robbie’s shoulder, dazed enough to just let himself take hold of Robbie like this, something within Robbie seems to give way.

It’s the relief that tells him. Of finally, properly reaching James. Of that thrum of restlessness that’s been a dull undercurrent to his days ever since James left so abruptly, starting to calm at last. And the worse, tightly wound rhythm of anxiety, that’d added to it since he’d first heard James was this ill, starting to unspool. But it’s also a relief to finally succumb to the knowledge of why he’d needed to come here to James, knowledge that Robbie must have been teetering on the edge of for God knows how long but is now resounding with a surety somewhere deep within him. And he can cease trying to convince himself that life is fine really, that this is what life after they’ve left the job is like, and it’s fine. He can just yield to the impossible rightness of this.

James makes a small noise of disbelief and surrenders a little further into his arms, his over-rapid heartbeat against Robbie’s own. And Robbie is being grasped as if he's the answer to a question that’s been eating at James too.

He needs to get him lying back down, he needs to calm James right now. He’s not about to release him yet, so he sinks down on the side of the bed and adjusts one arm around James’s shoulders. He’s sitting straight up and James is lying propped up on his pillows, but he can sort of keep an arm around him all the same. He looks down at James, who’s looking stunned.

“What’ve you been doing to yourself this time, eh?” he asks, shakily.

“How’d you get here?” James asks in wonder.

“The Wright brothers, lad, they invented this marvellous thing—” But James just looks confused. He’s not actually with it at all. His eyelids are starting to rest shut for brief seconds at a time before he blinks rapidly and refocuses that dazed stare on Robbie. He’s fighting off sleep and fever, Robbie realises. He reclaims his arm reluctantly, sliding it out gently from under James. “I’m going to head off now, let you get some rest. Just wanted to see you first.”

James, no mistaking it, looks bereft.

Robbie feels the need to explain a bit further. “I just need to get a bit of sleep, too, lad. Need to lie down.” _And have a think._

“It’s early—”

“Well, it’s still daytime on my body clock, but I can’t convince myself what time it is, just that I’ve been up all night.”

“You didn’t sleep last night?”

“No. I was on the plane and then when I landed I just checked in, had a shower and came here.”

“Oh, that’s why you look so old.”

“Hey—”

But James isn’t joking. He’s talking almost to himself and looking drowsily relieved. “You looked so haggard. I didn’t know you hadn’t slept—thought you might’ve been ill and it’d aged you…”

“Well, we’ll see how I look in the morning, okay? After me beauty sleep. Back before you know it.”

“Wear sunscreen. And a hat,” James instructs, rather slowly. He’s almost asleep now.

Robbie is amused, despite it all. “I’ve lived in the tropics before, you know, a whole lot longer than you have.”

“Oh, I remember.” Then his eyes jolt open as if something has startled him. Robbie, shocked, thinking he’s in pain, makes a grab for the call buzzer. But—“You didn’t bring that awful shirt?” James says, alarmed.

 

===

 

When he thinks back, in later years, to that first surreal night in Bangkok, high up in his hotel room, with the equally sleepless city thrumming its many, disparate rhythms far beneath him, Robbie will always associate his belated awakening about the real shape of this between him and James with a stiff back, with the cool sheets of the overly air-conditioned room, with a jangling, out-of-sync tiredness and yet an edge of something which is almost like arousal. Hope.

At some stage, he presses into service the button that draws the heavy curtains back on their mechanism and a wall of glass is revealed and the slowly moving lights of the city. When he lies back down on the firm comfort of the mattress, those lights below give way to the sky above which is suffused with the remnants of all that illumination, a sky too city-tethered to reveal the stars that are surely there.

 

===

 

He doesn’t want to disturb James too early the next morning. So after he’s finally managed to get a few hours’ rest, and given up on the unlikely prospect of any more in favour of a reviving shower and a surprisingly appetising breakfast, he heads outside into that dazzlingly bright heat.

There’s an internet café he’d spotted a few doors down from the hotel, and he wants to let Laura know that James seems as all right as can be expected and that Robbie coming here is all right too. It feels important to reassure Laura when her concern must have been for James, that James was vulnerable and that Robbie, all oblivious, was going to hurt him.

It’s not until he’s sitting in front of a computer, waiting impatiently for it to load his email account, that the full implications of that hit him. Laura had been trying to prevent him from hurting James. Did she think—He’d hurt James already, and she knew that. Her whole attitude of gentle support for James when he’d taken this contract. That sense he’d had that James wasn’t doing this for the right reasons—Christ. His own blinkers had led to James heading off over here. And worse; he doesn’t really want to think about how he’s made him feel to prompt that decision in the first place. Because James had felt that Robbie wouldn’t return his feelings, and he’d been sufficiently convinced of that that he’d never even tried to talk to Robbie.

He gives up on the internet connection, pays the rather disconcerted young man the minimum charge and heads out onto the street. He’ll have to leave Laura until later. He needs to get to James.

 

===

 

James hasn’t had the best night either. His own doctor overhears Robbie’s query at the main desk and comes over to greet and update him. Chris, who wants to be known on first-name terms, is a young American with Thai ancestry who’s come out here to work in this clinic. But he also goes out to more far-flung rural areas and volunteers in clinics there on a quarterly basis—seeing a lot of malaria in the process. Which is why he’s letting Robbie know that, Robbie suspects, as a reassurance. He’s submitting fairly calmly to Robbie’s instinctive assessment of him too. Laura was right that James seems to be in good hands.

But it turns out that these fevers that James is having can be quite severe and debilitating; they seem to be cyclical and can spike every so often, and James has been having trouble holding down the medication they want to treat him with, so he’s currently receiving it through that IV, which is also delivering an anti-emetic. And then, confusingly, Chris is also explaining that James is doing better overall this morning. Must be between cycles of fever, Robbie supposes. So Robbie’s not quite sure what he’s expecting when he reaches James’s room. It’s certainly not the reaction that he gets.

“It _is_ you,” James sounds almost accusing.

Robbie halts in surprise at the fierceness of that stare, trained right on the door. “Last time I checked, yeah,” he protests.

“It _is_.”

Maybe they’re wrong about his fever being better this morning. Maybe he’s still not quite with it. Robbie comes closer, to get a better look at him. James looks right back up at him, the intensity of his gaze not abating.

Robbie doesn’t really know what to say. “I was here—d’you remember? Yesterday evening?”

“No. I didn’t know—the nurses had all changed shift and no-one who’s on this morning knew if I’d had a visitor…I just didn’t know—”

“Well, I’m here, all right. Hope that’s—okay?” Robbie can’t help his voice coming out rather gruff.

“I—” But James looks like he’s really struggling now.

Robbie doesn’t think it’s fever or pain. It hits him that if half of what he now suspects is true, about why James left, then he needs to go quite slowly here. James is ill and quite vulnerable. And beyond that, the very unwelcome thought is starting to dawn on Robbie that he may have his work cut out for him here if James had really so irrevocably decided that nothing was going to happen between them that he’d upped and left Oxford without a word. And that was two months and a whole new life for James ago. What if he’s really let Robbie go by now and moved on? Or what if he’s so firmly in self-preservation mode that he’ll resist even trying with Robbie now? It’s a keenly horrible possibility. And yet—the way that James had reached for him and grasped him when he first saw him—

Robbie looks down at him and lets all of that go for the moment. James is clearly battling with himself, and the only thing that matters right now is easing his mind.

Robbie reaches for one of the chairs that are neatly paired on either side of a small table under the window, and pulls it closer to the bed. Then he drops down into it, doing his best to ignore James’s demeanour which is not exactly encouraging him. He doesn’t think he’ll be too welcome to sit on the bed this morning. And there’s an odd rigidity in James’s long body under the sheets and light blanket that cover him. Is he in pain?

James on his pillows has turned his head and is just looking at him. Robbie can’t help feeling it’s an acute contrast from last night. And it seems impossible that James doesn’t clearly remember that fateful embrace that’s meant so much to Robbie. If it had brought so much certainty to Robbie, then how come James could somehow doubt it? But Robbie does his best to send a grin at him.

“Well,” he starts. “You were pretty out of it, last night. You must have been. Even insulting my sartorial choices, you were.”

James gazes at him and for a moment it seems like he simply won’t comply. That he won’t fall back into the easy conversational patterns that have punctuated all their years together. That he’ll just keep on looking at Robbie with that almost angry, shuttered look. Then—

“That doesn’t sound like me, all right,” he agrees. “Must have been the fever. Or the drugs.” He’s still eyeing Robbie in a manner that Robbie doesn’t much like, but it’s something.

“In particular,” Robbie elaborates, “you were insulting the shirt that I had on, the first time we met.”

He’s watching so closely that he reckons he sees that tiny inward fold of James’s lips, a tell of amusement, almost before James registers it himself. “That shirt. Of course,” James says after a moment. And now he’s angling his head at Robbie, his expression more considering. “I always thought of it as your tropical shirt—well, amongst other adjectives. Although—I generally try my best not to remember it at all. If you were wearing _that,_ it’s no wonder I thought I was having a nightmare.”

“I wasn’t wearing that,” Robbie protests. He’s mightily relieved that James seems to have decided to let himself just relax into this while they get past this strangely difficult first phase. Well, he’s either decided to or pure habit is just taking over. But that highly disconcerting expression is starting to dissolve. Bloody hell, though. If this is just the first part—this is going to be ruddy tricky.

“I have no idea what you were wearing,” James is saying now, frowning. “I just had a sort of a sense that you were here. But then you weren’t, of course—when I woke up properly.”

“Sorry, James.” He really is. He should have left a note. He should have stayed longer. “I’d just arrived and I wanted to see you. Just dropped in before I went to get some sleep. Those plane seats…”

“Yes,” James agrees, rather emphatically.

Robbie gives him a genuine grin. “Can’t be much fun with your long legs,” he acknowledges. “Me back was at me a bit and I hadn’t slept—” and it’s ridiculous, of course it is, because James was well out of, he’s certainly confirmed that now, but stupid as it is “—and apparently I looked so bad you reckoned I’d aged,” he says, aiming for a jokily miffed tone. It might have come out less casual than he planned, because James narrows his eyes at him a bit.

“No,” he says. And he’s finally looking at Robbie quite openly.

“What?”

“No, you haven’t aged. You look tired still—well, it’s still night on your bodyclock—but overall—is it the allotment? You look quite well—like you’ve been spending time outdoors.”

“The allotment,” agrees Robbie. Stupidly relieved now. That’s James, isn’t it? If he spots what might be a sore point, although you’re trying to feel like it’s not, he holds back on his smart comments even as you invite him to make them. There’s still a difference between Robbie’s physical condition and that of his young ex-sergeant lying here on the bed. Even if Robbie is as fit as he was when he was a serving officer and he’s tending to take a bit better care of himself in general now that his time isn’t privy to the strictures of the job. But at least he doesn’t look older to James than whatever mental image James has had of him in his head.

“Where are you staying?”

Robbie names the hotel, which elicits a frown from James after a moment. All of his reactions seem to be slowed down. And it hasn’t escaped Robbie’s notice that he’s failed to lift his head at all. There are fine lines of pain at the corners of those intent blue eyes that really shouldn’t be there. “That’ll add up. I know most things are much cheaper here, but that place is still expensive.”

“Don’t you worry about that.”

“You could stay where I’m living. It’s the other side of the river but—”

“No. Thanks anyway. Have you seen the traffic?” Robbie is never going to complain about a traffic jam in Oxford ever again. “I wouldn’t be here before nightfall.”

“But you don’t have to be so near. You don’t have to come every day—you should be seeing the sights properly now you’re here. Have a holiday. I’m fine, really.” And he’s looking a question at Robbie. He’s also looking far from fine. It hasn’t escaped Robbie’s notice just how weak he seems to be. And Robbie’s worked out what the physical stiffness in his posture is about. He’s shaking a little which would have Robbie reaching for that call button if the doctor hadn’t explained a bit about these particular cycles, with chills preceding fevers. But it’s still quite difficult to watch as James tries to brace his body again to make it less obvious. “Go on a day trip—” he suggests to Robbie. “Or you could even—”

“You trying to get rid of me?” Robbie asks, jokily, affecting not to notice what James doesn’t want him to see.

“I don’t want to get used to—”

 _A comfort he should not permit himself—_ “I’ve the hotel booked for the first few nights anyway,” Robbie says gruffly. “No need for me to go anywhere. It came as a package deal with the flights. After that I’ll—”

“Flights aren’t cheap either.”

“Will you stop going on about cost.” _Like I’d put a price on you_. He shouldn’t have left last night. He shouldn’t have let James wake to further confusion and to simply persuading himself that he was still alone over here. That must be partly why he seems unwelcoming this morning. How long has he spent mulling over this since he woke, through his struggles with these chills and what Robbie suspects is one hell of a sore head?

James is frowning again, those telltale lines around his eyes deepening in sympathy with his perplexity, as he puzzles all of this out properly. “After that?” he repeats. “You’re staying?”

“Be a long way to come for just a couple of days, now, wouldn’t it?” He holds back on saying that all he wants to do right at this moment, with James lying on this bed so ill beside him in this foreign environment, is to get him back to Oxford. Apart from those tremors and the little tilts of his head as he tracks Robbie’s expressions, he looks like he can barely move.

“It’s a long way to come anyway.” And James’s expression goes quite blank as if the answer to the still unspoken query contained there doesn’t matter to him.

“Well, like I said in the first place, you could’ve chosen somewhere a bit closer,” Robbie reminds him gently.

“No, you didn’t.”

“What?”

“No, you didn’t say that.”

“Oh.” He must’ve said it to Laura.

“I’d remember if you’d said that,” says James quite to himself.

Oh, God. Why hadn’t he just let James know he minded him going away? Even if he hadn’t worked out what this was between them, he could have let him know how it wouldn’t be the same not having him around. Acting annoyed and a bit begrudging about his plans, sort of dismissing his ideas, really, wasn’t the same thing. At all. Had that made James feel it was all fairly hopeless? Is that why he hadn’t said something?

And now James, despite everything, is still trying to take care of Robbie in his unexpected arrival here.

“Go to mine. See if you’d like to stay there after the hotel. I could do with you getting some stuff if you didn’t mind? And because it’s a house that gets rented to foreign teachers, there’s a phone plan for making international calls. I’ll tell you and you can write down how you can do it, with my address.” And he nods at the pad of paper and pen on the bedside table that Robbie should have used last night. “Be better than hotel phone rates or sitting in an internet café, trying to talk to Lyn. She’ll be worried about you.”

Now that might be handy. Robbie decides not to mention that it won’t be Lyn he’s talking to. Lyn will have to make do with his emails. Because he has a distinct feeling that Laura holds a few answers here.

“You wouldn’t have to face the traffic to get here, you know. You could take the boat across the river and then get the sky train.”

And James seems exhausted just from that conversation, just from the effort of talking to Robbie. Of still trying to look after Robbie here, in the midst of it all.

 

===

 

James’s new accommodation has such a narrow frontage that Robbie, deposited by another obliging taxi at the end of this quiet little street, and utterly confused by this strange numbering system now, has walked past before he registers it. Because there’s a high painted wrought iron fence that extends across the front of the yard. It turns out there’s a gate in it, though, and the bigger key on James’s key ring opens that. And Robbie steps through into a little interior courtyard, finding himself in a sudden oasis of greenery again, the way that keeps happening in the little he’s seen so far of this city. There’s tall bamboo in pots, he recognises that, and a lot of the plants are suddenly familiar from his sojourn overseas.

And there are orchids, hanging in clay pots, a whole long line of them hung from a wire strung all the way to the front door.

He’s back to his return to Oxford all those years ago. The orchids that he’d brought back for Val. His own time overseas had been of some use, it had meant at least that he wasn’t running into reminders of his loss at every turn in Oxford, sudden reminders that used to knock him sideways and take away his ability to function for a moment, in this world without her. Being somewhere she’d never been had helped. But he’d kept coming across things that she’d have loved, like those orchids, or that he’d have enjoyed hearing her opinions on, and it had all been too raw then.

Bringing back those orchids had been a physical link from one world to another. And he’d returned to an Oxford that still resounded just as sharply with loss when he came back to it as it had when he’d left…and then there was James materialising, this new breed of up and coming recruit, with his deference to authority and his attempts to dispatch his duty and get this old, strange DI delivered to Innocent. James, who had ceased to look agitated for a while when he realised what their detour was for, and had vaguely surprised Robbie by getting out of the car. Then he’d stood at a distance in the cemetery and somehow managed not to intrude. Respectful, that’s what he’d been.

Robbie opens the front door, at the top of a flight of wide, shallow stone steps that’s pleasingly decorated with more greenery spilling out of pots, and he pauses, looking into one long room, sunlight spreading in welcoming fashion through a big window in the far wall, a wrought iron stairs spiralling upwards, compact and neatly beautiful, the whole shaded and cool with more white walls and cool tiled floors but neat dark furniture and framed artwork. And the unmistakeable scattered traces of James. Books—of course—and the guitar, and papers spread across a coffee table that must be his students’, his ipod, he’ll want that…

And just how much has James made himself at home here?

Then he turns his head to look back at this sunny retreat of a courtyard, this obviously well-kept rental property, and Robbie thinks of Oxford as it will be soon, when he gets back, what James would be picturing coming back to if he could be persuaded to come home with Robbie—Oxford in grey, unrelenting November—and his heart sinks.

 

===

 

Robbie finds himself bested by the time difference over the next few days. He has to resign himself to waiting for the weekend to come around to hopefully catch Laura, who’s obviously asleep or in work during Robbie’s own waking hours. And he needs to have a proper conversation with her. He can’t figure out why she wouldn’t have told him what was going on with James, if she’d known that part of his struggles when he left Oxford were to do with Robbie. And beyond the questions he’s got for her, he could badly do with her advice here.

Because James is just thoroughly worrying him now.

They’ve fallen into an odd routine. Well, they’ve always had their own odd routines. But this one—sometimes when Robbie arrives James is heavily asleep and Robbie simply keeps him company for a bit, while he reads his way through this admittedly fascinating Bangkok Times. And James will stir eventually and blink glassily at him, muttering something along the lines of _what’re you doing here?_ Robbie will give him a grin and deliver a response in reassuring matter-of-fact tones— _keeping up with international events,_ _lad_ or _keeping them mosquitoes away._  And James will frown in that endearingly familiar fashion and then clearly give up, mumbling _okay_ and surrendering to the reach of fatigue and fever once again.

Sometimes that’s all Robbie feels he can do for him. Be there and untangle James from the headphones of that ruddy ipod if he’s fallen asleep with it again. Try and sponge his hot forehead down with a cool flannel. Read him parts of articles from the paper. Get some more water into him if he can coax him upright enough for a little bit—and Robbie likes to think he’s better than the nurses at getting James to do that. They smile at him and check on James a bit less when Robbie’s here. James seems to be rather closely monitored when he’s alone. But they give him and Robbie a bit of privacy, and seem to almost let him look after James a bit. And they let Robbie stay until the worst of it seems to be past and James is sleeping more comfortably in its aftermath.

James seems to gravitate towards him when all his defences are down, always turning his head gradually to find Robbie’s voice, regardless of the position he starts off in. And sometimes he’ll find Robbie’s arm with a hot hand, if Robbie has pulled his chair close to the bed, keeping Robbie there as James sleeps.

It’s when he’s more alert that things are more difficult to work out. He doesn’t let himself touch Robbie then, he seems to pull back firmly into his own space, and Robbie finds himself pushing back into the chair in response and letting him be a bit. Well, James must be in a lot of discomfort even between these fever spikes, from how the doctor had explained it. He can’t get James to admit much about how he actually feels. “How’re you?” queries, when he arrives to find James more alert, receive a blatant lie of _Fine,_ in response from the patient, and are generally followed with a polite _How are you?_ “Me? I’m hot,” Robbie grumbles at him.

Sometimes, when his fever abates, it’s easier to put on a film so James can vaguely focus on that and vaguely chat as he relaxes a bit. Robbie has found DVDs in a big department store in the thriving modern area that seems to be yet another different city within this city of so many parts. He’s taken to spending some time each day sightseeing, partly to appease James who has obviously been worrying, dog-and-bone fashion, about cost still and Robbie having a proper holiday while he’s here.

And the temples and that palace are wonderful and Lyn sounds more reassured in her replies to Robbie’s own emailed accounts. Still obviously confused by this, but increasingly interested. What Robbie likes best is just sitting at a little table outside a café—and the food here is another pleasure entirely in itself, years of Thai takeaway are never going to do justice to a fairly simple bowl of real noodle soup—and just watching. He’d defy anyone not be fascinated by this place which lives its life on its streets.

The first morning, soon after he’s moved to James’s, that he finally abandons the taxis and tries this alternative route that James has advised, he discovers there’s even a little makeshift barbers shop around the corner from James’s house, setting up shop under a sprawling tree, rooted under broken concrete slabs that were a pavement before nature, urged on by the warmth of the tropics, began to reassert itself through the cracks in the city. With mirrors hung on a crumbling stone wall and even some sort of battery-operated revolving barber’s pole. Must ask James if he sits down in that chair for a shave and haircut and tries to indicate with his highly rudimentary Thai the highly precise instructions that probably go into that haircut.

By the time Robbie reaches the clinic he’s completely forgotten that. He has a bone to pick here. “It’s freezing on those trains!”

“Oh, yes,” James says. He’d seemed to be half-drowsing almost peacefully when Robbie arrived. Robbie had received a slow, small smile when he appeared and—well, James isn’t smiling that much at him when he’s fully awake. Although, he’s ill, of course, isn’t he? “So it is. Nice and cool.”

“Nice? And cool? It’s bloody Arctic. They blast you with air-con. Then you get off to change trains and you’re up on this outdoor platform and you’re hit by this grainy wind of warm air—and you’ve barely started to thaw out and you get on another one and it’s the bloody same! I needed a coat.”

“That’s true, yes,” James says happily. “I should’ve mentioned that.”

“Oh, you knew.” It’s revenge for Robbie’s repetitive grumbles about being hot. “Should take you on one of them,” he mutters at the rather smug patient. “That’d soon sort your ruddy fever.”

James stretches a little, with the caution of someone whose movements have been constrained by pain. He’s generally been staying so still that Robbie suspects he’s struggling with these muscular aches the doctor talks about. “D’you like the boat?”

Robbie had liked the boat, zig-zagging across the wide river, against the floating traffic and through the slipstream of those huge barges, working its way upstream to various stops. And the way that the city had opened out into white light and space as he’d stood on the deck at the rail.

And who’d want to go back to commuting in their car in the rain in Oxford when they can travel like that to work? He settles into the chair beside the bed and regards James for a moment. But there’s something different now about this room they’re in, which has begun to feel highly clinical to Robbie even underneath all the more domestic touches. There’s a row of cards, and even a basket of bright birds-of-paradise flowers, on the table below the window.

“What’s all this, then?”

James looks shyly pleased. “One of the other teachers was in last night after you left. To drop in my phone which—got left in the school.” _When he’d collapsed there._ “And he brought some cards from my students—”

“You get on well with them—your colleagues?”

“They’re fine. People come overseas for all sorts of reasons, it’s very—well, no-one probes much, there’s just an easy enough acceptance. Better than a bunch of coppers probing at your seminary background, that’s for sure. There are people from all over the place and all sorts of backgrounds. They’re good to have a beer with in a pavement café at the end of the night—it’s good to unwind after spending the evening in front of a class, you see. It can be quite energising, the teaching.”

Robbie can see how that would appeal to James. Keeping things just at the level of matter-of-fact casualness that he seems to have with his bandmates in Oxford. But it obviously isn’t just the relief of getting on with his colleagues that James must have found appealing in this job. “You must have done well with the teaching, lad.” It wasn’t something Robbie had thought to ask about—because of course James would be good at it—but looking at the array of cards from James’s students, some of them carefully hand-drawn, all obviously neatly arranged by these kind nurses—he realises that he’s been remiss.

“I don’t know, it’s more about being patient than anything else—and encouraging—when I read the messages I realised I’ve comprehensively failed to get across some of the niceties of English grammar to one or two of them…” It might sound churlish if he wasn’t so obviously holding back a grin. It isn’t the grammar in those messages that he’s thinking about. “Anyway, they’re not my students any more. My classes have been reallocated.” And he looks rather frustrated at that. “But I might land up with some of the same classes next term.”

“Next term?”

“Yes. There’s a new one starting in a few weeks.”

“But you—”

“Should be better by then. They’re letting me decide about committing further.” And, having made that little announcement, he reaches for today’s copy of the newspaper and holds it out in silence. One of the nurses, having come across Robbie reading aloud an article to a half-asleep James a few days back, has taken to extracting a copy from the selection in the clinic waiting room downstairs and dropping it in to James in the morning. Robbie doesn’t think James is requesting that he read to him, though. He seems to want to put Robbie and his reaction to this firmly behind that paper barrier of the spread pages of this broadsheet.

Any time they get near this topic of James’s return—or not—to Oxford, James’s tone and whole demeanour goes flat like this. Although his words have been more non-committal up until now. And Robbie, for his part, has evaded the intermittent, vaguely curious comments obviously aimed at him and the fact of his own continued presence here.

They’ve always been mightily skilled at not talking about stuff, he and James.

And while it’s reassuring to find him like this, more himself, frustratingly himself, maybe—there are still times when he seems to go sharply downhill again. The whole cyclical nature of this illness—it’s bloody stressful and it almost seems to echo what’s going on between the two of them now. The way that Robbie will make progress and James will seem glad to see him and have him here and even surrender to him when he’s feeling at his worst, in sleepy co-operation. But then he’ll push at Robbie, hard, like this, when he’s more himself. Or has more of his defences up. Like he just can’t let himself really give in to Robbie. Or won’t.

 

===

 

“What’re you doing here?”

Robbie grins at him, about to come up with a retort, but glad to see him resurfacing even if it’s just for another round of this. He’s come back after lunch and stayed on, late into the afternoon, a bit uneasy. Maybe from James’s words this morning, implying that all this still hasn’t deterred him. That he’s landed up this ill and yet he may still want to stay on. Well, that—or—is he just digging his heels in? Does he actually want to? But James had also seemed to grow tired rather too rapidly today and his chills had seemed worse than usual before he’d dropped off, leaving Robbie to a half-watched film and his thoughts.

“Putting off going back on that ruddy train after the shock of this morning,” Robbie starts to reassure him. Then his attention narrows to the look of James. This time—something about his breathing doesn’t sound right. Robbie gets up and bends over the bed.

“But you shouldn’t be here,” James mumbles, his eyes not focusing properly on Robbie. “You're not meant to be here. I thought I’d left you behind.”

“Course you didn’t,” Robbie soothes. “How could you do that? Wouldn’t let you do that, now, would I?”

“I did, I did—” His voice is rising sharply, he’s getting more agitated, and Robbie glances for the call buzzer, wondering if he should call for a nurse. “I know I did.”

Robbie reaches out instinctively to calm him, letting himself press James’s arm, holding him. “All right. You did. You’re right, James, you did. But then I came after you, all right? It’s all right now.”

“Not all right. Not all right at all—” And he's tugging his arm away from Robbie’s grasp, actually giving Robbie a slight shove away from the bed. And that’s enough. Robbie hits the call button with a sharp jab.

“You shouldn’t be here,” James informs him one more time before a nurse thankfully appears and brushes straight past Robbie over to the bed. Robbie stands back to let her have access to help James properly. James doesn’t seem to notice his withdrawal because he’s already removed himself so effectively from Robbie’s touch. So he retreats to the corridor, still able to hear James’s distressed mumbles below the soothing efficiency of the nurse. But it doesn’t feel like any medication they have to offer is going to fix this.

 

===

 

Robbie won’t be getting the courtesy of less frequent checks from the nurses any longer. They’re none too impressed that he hadn’t called them much sooner. But their displeasure softens and gives way in the face of how shaken he must look. Even Chris, once he finally leaves a silently sleeping James alone to talk to Robbie, understandably misreads the source of Robbie’s shock.

“It’s all under control now—if you wanted to go and get some rest. He should be fine. He’ll probably just sleep. I’m on tonight, I could always give you a call later—” Robbie doesn’t want to, though. At all. He has a feeling, as unshakeable as it is illogical but sharply borne of being so resoundingly pushed away by James, that if he does leave he really will lose hold of him altogether now.

And he needs to be here when James wakes up. He needs to see for himself, beyond what anyone else says, that James is James and he’s all right. He won’t be going anywhere and leaving James lying oblivious in a hospital bed. He’s had that feeling once before, too.

Robbie must drop off in the end, in the chair that he’s pulled back close to the bed and its sleeping occupant, because something calls him out of a muddled dream that drifts away from him as he comes to. When his eyes flicker open, the room is lit by artificial light now and he finds himself being regarded with a drowsy consideration this time.

It’s an unutterable relief.

“Hey,” he says softly.

James blinks at him for a moment. “Sir—”

“Not sir.” It seems to matter somehow.

“Robbie—”

“Let me get them to have a look at you now.”

But James is holding out a hand to halt him. “Were you asleep?”

“Me? Dozed off for a bit, yeah.”

“You shouldn’t sleep in that chair. Because of your back—”

Ah, Christ. He wants to push Robbie away, doesn’t he? But he still can’t stop his concern for him. Robbie can’t work out what to do here. It hasn’t escaped him that James, in his sleep, has turned towards Robbie again, just as he moves and reaches towards him any time his defences are down. But when he’s more able to reason he wants to guard himself more closely. And underneath it all—well, what does he really feel? Robbie feels completely helpless trying to make sense of this. “My back’s fine,” he says gruffly. “I’ll get one of those massages in the morning.”

He's expecting a crack about being careful about what kind of massage parlour he lands up in, but instead James is gazing out the window, at the darkness. “What time is it?”

“It’s late—go on back to sleep, you. I’ll stay here—”

“No, you go, I’m fine, honestly.”

“I’m not going, James.”

“I’ll sleep better if—” He stops.

“You’ll sleep better by yourself, will you.” Robbie tries to keep his voice dead casual. “All right, lad. Won’t disturb you any further. See you in the morning, so.”

He doesn’t get very far. He lets a nurse know that James is awake now. Then he makes his way down in the empty hum of the lift, through the deserted corridor and comes slowly to a halt, leaning against the wall, cool against his shoulder after years of ceaseless air-conditioning, and he seems to absorb the artificial chill. He’s too cold himself now. He doesn’t think he’ll sleep.

He’s stayed and yet he seems to be losing him anyway.

Or else he’s simply being offered what he and James have always had—their own particular mode of friendship—except that it turns out that what they’ve always had has had more to it than Robbie had been willing to see. And now James is effectively removing that. This feeling of losing hold of James, that he’s tried to reason himself out of, since they’d stopped being inspector and sergeant. Robbie hadn’t known that he was onto something there. That he was the one who was being let go of.

It’s in the silent taxi back that it occurs to him that he can do what he’s done before when James has worried him beyond reason. The time difference is going to work in his favour at last at this hour. He’s going to get hold of Laura.

 

===

 

“Robbie? What on earth time is it there? Is James all right?”

“Yeah.” Robbie doesn’t know if he is, really. He tries again. “He seems to be slowly on the mend—with a few setbacks, like.”

“Okay,” comes Laura’s reassuring voice.

“He’s just—”

“Robbie?”

“I understand what you were saying—trying to say. About how I should be careful of him, coming over here.”

“What’s happened?” she asks warily.

“I just understood it properly. Soon as I saw him—”

“He was so glad to see you that you realised?” There’s that same note of frustration in her voice that he’d come up against whenever they’d encountered the topic of James over the past few months. Except now he fully understands it.

“No. Other way around. I was that glad to see him that I realised…”

_“Oh.”_

“Yeah.”

“Oh now, that’s different,” observes Laura thoughtfully.

“Aye, it’s different, all right. That’s one way of putting it. It came as a bit of a shock—”

“Well—at long bloody last,” comes a mutter down the line from Oxford.

“That’s not especially helpful—”

She gives a sudden sigh. “Well, James—he just tugs at the heart strings a bit at times, doesn’t he? With no clue he’s doing it. And he’s so _loyal_ to you, Robbie, even when you’re so oblivious. And he—I sometime feel a bit guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“You and me—I don’t mean guilty about us giving it a try. At all. We’d every right to and that’s what we said, didn’t we, when we called it a day? No regrets.”

“Aye. We did.”

“But it just seemed wrong that something so short for us should cause James so much pain.”

“Pain? It wasn’t pain. He—” _He talked me through cooking dinner for you the first time I did it, he was well supportive, he’s pushed at us getting together, on and off, for years when we were dancing round each other. He—_

Oh, Christ. This—James realising what was between them before Robbie did—James wanting more with Robbie and Robbie failing to notice—it predates Robbie and Laura getting together. Of course it does. It’s not just a recent thing that Robbie had failed to see for a while before James left. Which means that James has been struggling to deal with this on his own for God knows how long—

“Pain. He supported you and me because he wanted you to be happy, Robbie. But when we got together, he gave up then. And I suppose—well, it was worse for him once we’d finally been together and broken up. And he was no longer even your sergeant. I wasn’t any sort of barrier any more, you were obviously ready to move on and yet—it just didn’t seem to occur to you to see your relationship with him in that light. He must have felt like you never would. And given up hope. And then I guess it just all got a bit too much for him, so—off he went.”

“I wish you’d said to him to maybe talk to me—”

“Robbie, that’s not fair. I tried. I couldn’t come straight out and tell him I knew—he’d have been mortified. I did try persuading him that maybe he could just talk to you properly about—well, your friendship with him and that he should be clearer that he was planning on staying over there more permanently than these three months. Which he very obviously is. I thought that that would maybe make you see how much you’d mind. And that was hard enough to suggest when I didn’t actually know how you’d react if you did grasp how James felt. I didn’t know you’d feel this way about it…” And her voice trails off in considering fashion as she obviously starts to picture properly the prospect of Robbie actually giving in to feeling the same as James. She sounds rather intrigued.

“Anyway,” she starts again, after a moment, “he battened down the hatches of every defence he’s got at the mere suggestion. At me even going near the topic.”

She’s been torn between her loyalties to both of them and her concern for James in his vulnerability and mounting distress. And guilty, despite herself, about their relationship attempt adding to James’s struggle at a time when he was already so burnt out and then eaten up by guilt over Adam Tibbit’s suicide that he couldn’t live with himself without leaving the job he’d been so good at.

And he’d come over here, this far from home and everything he knew, in an attempt to escape from all of it, and Robbie too, and find a way to get on with his life. And yet—once he’d got here, he’d just started to talk away to Robbie with those emails, more able to cope with it all with a bit of distance. More able to cope with Robbie again with that distance between them, able to compartmentalise him.

“I think I’m making things worse for him—I’m just upsetting him, being here.”

“Why would you be—” Laura starts, confused, and then stops. “You really haven’t talked to him yet, have you?” she confirms to herself. “Robbie—”

“He’s been ill and—I just don’t know if maybe—he’s trying to make a new life. Okay, maybe sort of a rootless one but then James was never all that rooted in Oxford, was he? And I’m maybe just disturbing him, when he’s made his decisions…”

And if he does grasp Robbie’s feelings and they’re no longer welcome—he’s going to move from vague probing about Robbie being here to full-on defensive manoeuvres. James could send Robbie back to Oxford while he’s still lying ill in a hospital bed.

“He was rooted where you were, Robbie. He could be again. There’s only one way to find out, you know. And maybe it’d help him to know either way. Whatever happens. If you let him know how you feel. You’d need to do it clearly, though. The last thing he can handle is more confusion.”

Unless it’s too late already. And James has finally dealt with the confusion by moving straight on past it and into a new life where he gives no room to these feelings for Robbie. And Robbie should have known better. He should’ve known. He knows James. He should’ve let himself see this and he should’ve known.

 


	3. Chapter 3

“You feeling any better?” Robbie’s back at the clinic early enough, despite his own short night. He’d been too restless to linger over breakfast or delay in any way.  Landing a blunt discussion of everything on James when he’s this ill and weak, and can’t escape or withdraw from Robbie as yesterday had suggested he might want to—that mightn’t be fair. James’s recovery is still what matters here. But when it comes right down to it, the painfulness of yesterday and all the revelations that his conversation with Laura have set off in his head notwithstanding, that need to see that James is all right and to get evidence that he really is recovering has hold of Robbie and it keeps pulling him back to this cool white room and its so-familiar worrisome occupant _._

James looks like he’s had a good rest, at least. He’d been thumbing through a book when Robbie arrived, although Robbie knows he lacks the concentration to read. “Better than—what?” he enquires.

It’s a fair question. “You were quite bad late yesterday afternoon—not making too much sense, maybe.”

“What exactly did I say?” James asks warily.

“It was more—You pushed me away.”

“Oh,” says James apologetically. “Sorry.” Then he furrows his brow, apparently wondering why Robbie is bringing this up. “Didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No. You were just—quite determined.” _Quite sure._ But James isn’t getting it. He does seems alert enough that he’d probably like some distraction, though. Robbie is feeling that frazzled today that he could almost welcome it himself. He reaches for the selection of films they have left and then spots something and hands James his phone instead. “You’ve got a new text there.”

“School,” says James wryly as Robbie goes to set up the player. “Just reminding me of the deadline to sign up for next term.”

Why won’t he see that he’s not in a fit state to—“You know this malaria—it can recur. For years, Laura said.”

“The medication they have me on, it’s aimed at preventing relapses, though. And it is working, it just takes a little while. You can reassure Laura properly that I’m in competent hands when you get back. And—it would be good if you could let her know that I did take antimalarials, by the way.” He gives Robbie an eyebrow raise of complicity. “Before I get a very to-the-point email in my inbox…”

Robbie’s not to be distracted. “I know all that. I’d just feel better if you were back in Oxford.”

James looks startled at the blunt admission. “I’m fairly sure I’m recovering—they’ll know from my labs soon enough. Anyway, speaking of Oxford—”

Well they’re certainly shattering their unwritten rules this morning. Of not directly mentioning these jointly-avoided, hopelessly-intertwined topics of James staying on here despite it all, and Robbie’s continued presence. But it all cuts too close to the bone for Robbie now. “Stop tryin’ to get me to go.”

“Then stop trying to get me to come,” James says indignantly.

“If you’re not bloody well coming then I’m not bloody well going.”

A corner of James’s mouth quirks briefly in his old endearing way _._ “Your tourist visa will run out,” he states, deadpan.

“So I’ll renew it.”

“But you can’t. You’d have to leave the country and come back in.”

“So I’ll do that, then.”

“You’d have to go to Ranong or Kawthong. That’d be some journey. Or travel the length of the country to cross the border at Padang Besar. Or, seeing as you’re enjoying boats so much, you should try taking a ferry then from Satun to Langkawi. You’d enjoy Malaysia—”

Cocky sod. “Always wanted to go to—all those places you just said. Top of my holiday destination list, they are. Right after Skegness.”

“Going to settle down and live here, are you?” James enquires. “Back in the tropics? I’m not sure you have that many favours to call in with Innocent that she’d arrange to take you back and have you seconded out here. Although I’d love to see you directing that traffic.” Robbie would too. It seems to follow neither rhyme nor reason sometimes. And there are elephants amongst the city traffic here. On the road. Actual ruddy Elephants.

“No, I’m not going to be a policeman. I’ll teach English too. It’s me mother-tongue.”

“You can’t,” says James with conviction. “No one will understand your accent. You’d have to keep reminding them that aye isn’t an actual word.”

“Aye, it is. And you can be me interpreter. You’re well used to the way I talk—”

“I’d think having an interpreter in order to teach a language would slightly defeat the point of the exercise… ” But he’s shaking his head ruefully now, giving in despite himself to amusement at Robbie’s inability to back down from this ridiculous argument. And his stubbornness.

Yesterday is too vivid in Robbie’s mind, though, as he looks at James’s much-missed grin, and he’s not amused in the slightest. There’s too much at stake underneath all this. Above and beyond the need to talk to James properly about them, there’s something far more urgent that makes him push the words that really matter out at James without a trace of levity.

“I’m not going anywhere until you’re well enough, James. Do you understand that? I’m not leaving you in here by yourself _.”_

And he leaves James absorbing that in the sudden silence and clicks the film on.

 

===

  

James is fast asleep when there’s a soft knock at the open door, rousing Robbie from his book. They’ve managed to settle themselves rather restlessly these past couple of days after things almost coming to a head like that. Robbie makes his best appeasing grimace at Chris now.

Because James has landed on his front again, regardless of the IV. The nurses always tut and try to coax him back into a better position whenever they catch him at that. But Robbie lets him be. He can untangle the line if it’s at any risk from those long limbs. Or nudge him over if he seems to be getting too hot. Those godawful fevers seem to be more under control at last, anyway.

And James seems to need sleep like an injured animal seeking healing at this stage. Or maybe trying to achieve hibernation, the way he burrows himself into those pillows. Can’t hurt to let him. Robbie can keep an eye. He’s rested his arm on the side of James’s pillow and James is pressing his head a bit against it. He’s just worn out now, poor sod. It might partly be the effect of being cooped up in this room for so long. And he doesn’t much welcome this disturbance from his doctor.

But Robbie does have some questions. And it seems only fair to ask them in front of James, even just a muzzily-aware James who’s doing his utmost to ignore both of them. Chris, when Robbie encounters him on his way in or out, seem perfectly willing to make a moment to keep Robbie informed as official next of kin. But James may not know that. He thinks of James’s words to that efficient course administrator and he wonders what James feels now about his choice of Robbie as his emergency contact.

There’ll be a set of labs back tomorrow, Robbie discovers. And they think that James’s clinical picture seems improved overall, so they’re hoping that these results will finally confirm that. 

Robbie starts to ask about this benign strain of malaria that doesn’t seem very benign to him, with all that he’s had to watch James go through, and these risks of recurrence.

Chris thoroughly welcomes the opportunity to expound on a pet topic to an interested audience. Between that, his obvious intelligence and his general unobtrusive kindness, he’s distinctly beginning to put Robbie in mind of someone else. Ironically, James does not much appreciate this particular trait in other folk when he’s trying to get some sleep.

“Sickle-bearing,” he translates grumpily without moving his half-sheltered head as Chris elaborates on this falciparum strain and how, essentially, it would have been worse. Robbie doesn’t much like the sound of that all right. 

“…so, all in all, his contracting P. vivax is truly a better—”

“From vivere,” conjugates James to Robbie’s elbow with a small yawn, “to live.”

That doesn't sound so automatic, that sounds—God, he’s doing that thing he used to do on cases. Slipping in a translation almost before Robbie can raise an enquiring eyebrow. It hadn’t taken Robbie long to get used to that when he’d started working with his walking encyclopaedia. Well, Robbie had had practice. Morse used to inform Robbie of things, too. But while Morse had done it in impatient fashion, delivering information to his sergeant that he personally felt the world should already know, James’s voice had quickly become an undercurrent in Robbie mind, letting Robbie focus on his own thoughts and impressions as he asked questions and gauged reactions, relying on James to neatly slip in any information he needed, to parry back to any dons trying to disconcert or distract so Robbie could just move forward with honing in on what he needed to get from them.

Chris, naturally unaware of any of this, is frowning at James now. “Not delirious,” Robbie assures him. “It’s all right. He just does that. When he’s stone cold sober and in his right mind, too.”

“Well—and a far more problematic strain in this region of the world now would be P. knowlesi—”

 _“_ Dunno that one,” comes the mumble after a moment, querulous now. Chris casts a slightly long-suffering look at the patient. Robbie grins.

“We’re not in Oxford any more, lad,” he murmurs to James. “Not everything’s in Latin.” Mustn’t be if James doesn’t know it.

Chris, with a reluctant grin, concedes defeat, abandons his impromptu seminar and leaves, as James works his head further under Robbie’s arm with a sigh that sounds like satisfaction. Just like he’s managed to lodge himself firmly in every rough corner of Robbie over the years. And maybe even more so now after all the times when he’s let himself submit to Robbie’s rough and ready methods of trying to look after him throughout this. It’s going to be bloody hard to dislodge him from Robbie’s heart if he really wants Robbie to leave him over here in this new life of his. He’s going to leave too much of a hole.

 

===

 

“He’s got you down to a T, that’s what I reckon. If I ever mislay you I’ll know where to find a spare.” But James’s sceptical expression is refusing to acknowledge this newly-recognised resemblance that Robbie’s now convinced of. “Change his colouring, add a few inches in height and a few more years—”

“Yes, we could clearly have been separated at birth.”

“—and get him to put in a bit more work on his smirk. An’ his sarcasm—”

Robbie breaks off hurriedly as Chris himself appears bearing a small sheaf of paper clutched against James’s file and with a rather satisfied look playing at the edges of his expression.

 _Aye, and that’s you when you know you’re sitting on a little titbit that you’ve worked out and you’re about to reveal it to me on a case,_ Robbie wants to say.

“I knew yesterday it was time you left—when you were well enough to interrupt my well-researched discourses with an etymology heckle,” Chris announces. James casts a suspicious glance at him, but then the words start to sink in for both him and Robbie.

Oh. Well, that’s good. That’s great. Of course it is. James is looking delighted. He’ll have been getting cabin fever by now. And those lab results are an official stamp of approval that he really is better. So now he’s better, he’s back on his feet—he’d been literally back on his feet this morning when Robbie had arrived to find him wandering round the room with that IV gone—and there’s no concrete need for Robbie to stay any longer.

“Today?” James is asking. And he turns to Robbie, grinning now.

Robbie does his best. “That’s great, lad. I’ll go an’ get all those forms you’ll doubtless need to sign, will I? See if we can get you out of here as soon as possible.” It’ll give him a moment to take in the suddenness of this new development.

He’s not wrong about the forms, either. “This’ll take you right back to CID,” he jokes to James when he returns to the room to find that James is packing up the last of his things and looks more than ready to go. James grimaces at him, but is far too pleased to put much into it. He drops down into Robbie’s chair and Robbie pulls up the second one at the little table beside him and watches his erstwhile sergeant bending his head to rather different paperwork than he used to turn his quick mind to for Robbie. 

Some of his information is already printed on them, but there are still a fair few details to complete.

And James pauses, suddenly, his pen coming to a stop on the page he’s methodically working his way through. “I forgot that I—” He looks up to meet Robbie’s enquiring look. “On my forms when I registered at this clinic. Through the school. I’d put you down as an emergency contact. They insisted on having one—”

“I know.” Robbie is surprised that this seems to be coming as something of a shock. “How did you think I knew you were ill?”

James stares at him across the table. “Well, I thought someone from the school had looked at my mobile numbers, of course,” he says eventually. “And found your number—there’d have been a recent text from you. So I assumed one of them had texted you…”

“No. No, your course administrator, she rang me, more officially like, to tell me. As your contact. Dead efficient she was, reminded me of Innocent, only she was—”

“Oh, God. I never meant—it’s not like I’m in CID any more, I didn’t think anything would ever actually _happen._ It was just a stupid question on a form. That’s why you came? Because they said it was an emergency? It’s not, it wasn’t, I’m _sorry_ —”

“Stop that. That’s not why I’m here. I didn’t think you were at death’s door. I just—”

And there it is. It might be the wrong place and time but there’s no evading the question for either of them any longer. “Why _did_ you come?”

Robbie swallows down the impulse to joke that he’d thought he could do with a holiday anyway. That James should have seen the weather back home.

“I couldn’t stick the thought of you alone. It didn’t seem right not to—” True though it is, it’s the wrong way to go. James’s face is shuttering fast at the implication that Robbie may have felt sorry for him, not having anyone else in his life who would come to him. “I needed to see for myself that you were all right, James. That’s what I mean. They did say you would be. Laura rang up and they said you would, but—”

James drops his eyes to the form, although he doesn’t seem to be reading it. He’s not convinced. He’s not convinced that Robbie wasn’t somehow misled into coming because he’d thought James was far worse. That idea somehow makes more sense to James than that Robbie would have come just because he wanted to—which cuts at Robbie’s heart with a peculiar ache.

“Look at me, James, would you? I was glad when she said you’d put me down on your form. Right glad. I wish you could’ve done it without a second thought. And Lyn and Laura—they both tried to talk some sense into me. I didn’t want their sort of sense. I wanted yours. You’d have taken a bullet for me there for seven years and me for you.” _You nearly did once_ , _shouting out like that. "_ That’s the sort of sense I wanted. That’s the sort of sense that makes sense about you, to me.”

Thankfully, James seems to know what he’s getting at. He’s looking at Robbie ruefully. He does understand it, Robbie can see that. But does he think that Robbie still sees their connection as just part of their being coppers together, being partners? Maybe Robbie shouldn’t have left him to wonder about this for so long. Maybe they should have thrashed it out sooner.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with meself if you were over here sick and I was back there worrying.” Robbie tries to explain it in a way that has nothing to do with the job too.

“Yeah,” James says with a sigh. It finally makes Robbie see the best way to get through to him.

“James. If it was me. If the situation was reversed. What would you have done?”

“I’d’ve come.”

“There you are,” says Robbie, deeply relieved. “Same thing.”

“I don’t think it is,” says James slowly. He might have raised his head, but his focus is over Robbie’s shoulder now. Robbie fights back the urge to take hold of him and make him just understand—

“You think I care any the less for you than you do for me? Now, that’s just—” He’s getting angry now.

“I think you care—differently,” says James carefully.

“Well, maybe I don’t,” says Robbie. This is not the way he’d imagined doing this. Almost through an argument. Mind, he’d been unable to imagine what words to use, so maybe an argument is the best way to bring out these feelings with James. Maybe it’s almost right after all those years of sparring.

“You what?” Well, that’s earned him proper eye contact.

“Maybe I don’t,” says Robbie defiantly, “care differently. Maybe I care just the same way you do.” 

“The same way I did?”

 _Did?_ “I—” But Robbie doesn’t know how to reply to that. James has just blurted out his question, uncensored. So that’s how he actually feels—that he did care, that way, for Robbie, and—does he not, anymore? Robbie feels a rather cold fear start to settle on him.

But he tries again. Even in the face of the lack of encouragement, the utter wariness in James’s expression, Robbie needs to give this another go. He needs to be sure. Because it can’t really be too late, can it?

“I care about you,” he starts slowly, “enough to do a lot more than this. More than—it’s more than I’d do for anyone else. More than I’d do for a friend. I couldn’t stick the thought of you ill and alone and I wanted to see you that much. It wasn’t right without you. So I came.”

James is looking at him. But he’s not looking approachable. He’s looking more resigned. As if this simply doesn’t mean much to him, all that Robbie is struggling to say here. Because he gets it, Robbie would warrant he gets it. He just—isn’t willing to reciprocate. He doesn’t want to hear this from Robbie now. Any more.

“Oh,” he says.

It’s just so bloody difficult. On the one hand, he’d seemed to look at Robbie, for an instant there, contemplating him, when Robbie managed to say that. And there had been a certain lift in his whole expression, there’d been something there. And then he’d seemed to stop himself and return to matter-of-factly making sure he kept Robbie at a certain distance. With his eyes withdrawn and sliding their focus a little elsewhere again now, and his whole tense posture almost removing himself from Robbie even while he’s still here. And mainly he just looks resigned.

And Robbie’s just all–out said how he cares for him, he couldn’t have made that much clearer, so if James isn’t responding now…

He catches James’s eye. James looks back at him, meeting his gaze, perfectly calm. Perfectly matter-of-fact. “Most of these forms can be filled in at home and sent back in within the next few weeks.”

“What?”

“So—should we get going, then?”

Oh. So he knows now and he just—it just doesn’t make any difference to him. Or enough difference. He doesn’t want to feel that way for Robbie any more so it’s not welcome that Robbie does. And so James will ignore it.

Funny how something you never quite had in the end—and yet something Robbie could have had, he just knows, if he’d only ever thought to ask at a far earlier time—funny how the utter removal of the chance of it, can feel like such a loss.

 

 ===

 

Maybe it’s for the best that Robbie's headed back to Oxford when he seems to endure that many nights in this city when sleep is hard to come by. Either way, he is headed back. He’s booked his flight for a few days’ time, in a slightly protracted negotiation on James’s laptop that had involved emails back and forth with the travel agency in Oxford earlier this evening.

“Need a hand?” James had offered, an ingrained habit whenever he sees Robbie frowning over anything online-related.

“No.”

And that had been that. James, Robbie can take a damn good guess, has probably been on to his school too, confirming that he will be signing up for next term.

And now Robbie lies in the cool darkness, in James’s small spare room, in bed relatively early but having given up on the idea of reading. Much as he and James had given up, by mutual unspoken consent, on their rather strained evening. Robbie had gone out to get dinner and they’d eaten in almost polite fashion together and—Christ, polite? With James? Proper politeness, too, such as Robbie hasn’t been subjected to since their earlier days together. But neither of them had seemed able to find a way past it. There hadn’t seemed much to say, and the silences this evening certainly weren’t comfortable ones. Resorting to TV hadn’t helped much. And James had been wise to head to bed early, of course, in the early stages of recovery as he is.

It’s just that an awareness of him in the next room seems to be keeping Robbie awake. He doesn’t fancy James is much happier than he is. Which is sort of understandable. He’s fought to get himself back to normal, he’s made this new life for himself, which can’t have been easy, and then here comes Robbie—it’s just timing. But it all seems such a bloody waste.

And the air-conditioner’s hum runs to a halt.

The night sky seems properly dark for the first time when Robbie pulls back the curtains to push the windows open to their fullest extent. Not that he thinks that’ll do much. He tries to settle back down to endure this. Because the air outside is so still and close that it feels like none of it can press its way into this room, which is already becoming stifling— 

The weight of the air on his chest and the heaviness of his thoughts combine to propel him restlessly up off the bed, with no very clear idea of where he’s going, and out into the landing, where he collides with a tall warm body. There’s a steadying hand immediately on his elbow. “Come on outside, it’ll be cooler.”

 James, who had been moving towards Robbie’s room in the dark.

And it is cooler, somehow. It might be that the sky seems to retreat and open out just a little more in the front courtyard, with James’s entire neighbourhood now in unrelieved darkness and silence. Robbie follows the press of James’s guiding hand to sink down beside James on the stone steps, the same hand that had reached back to rest on Robbie’s arm to guide him through the house, around the potential traps of that wooden furniture, after he’d carefully followed James and the guiding spiralling rail down that wrought iron stairs.

James withdraws his hand. He settles himself on the steps, leaning back, propped on his braced arms, with his head back, gazing upwards. Robbie would almost swear there’s a star or two attempting to emerge in that sky, from behind what must be the obscuring confusion of invisible clouds. And the steps are still warm from the soaked-in heat of the day. But there’s a bit of space between him and James as they sit on them where there never used to be one.

“This happen much?” Robbie asks eventually.

“Mmm. Kept meaning to warn you. Clinic had its own generator, of course. Lucky it didn’t happen to you before tonight.” James stifles a yawn. “Wish I could remember where I put the candles,” he mutters.

Then he brings himself upright and starts to poke about beside his foot. There’s a little wonderfully carved wooden box at the base of one of the plant pots. Robbie had spotted it before. He’d immediately investigated, slightly incredulous, hoping that James hadn’t lost any of his copper’s instincts to the extent that he’d actually leave a key lying like an artistically wrapped gift literally on his doorstep. Gently residential though this neighbourhood seems to be, and especially this street that Robbie has now realised is actually too narrow and tree-bulwarked for cars to venture down.

But all that was in the box was James’s ubiquitous lighter, although one with the alien Thai script on it now, and some ruddy strange spiralling things. They’d looked like the rings off an electric cooker, but made of something odd that had crumbled at the edges under Robbie’s curious touch.

“Times like this now I miss having a smoke.”

“Do you not smoke any more?” Come to think of it, James hadn’t disappeared off outside at all this evening. It would have been hard to tell if he’d been going through nicotine withdrawal in the clinic with everything else he’d had going on.

“No. Gave them up when I got here. It seemed easier to change things when I was somewhere so different.” And he bends his head, the lighter flares and he’s set the end of one of the spirals alight. “Mosquito coils,” he explains. Robbie’s not sure how effective they’ll be but he’s still glad to hear it.

And he doubts it could have been quite as easy to give up those cigarettes as James’s casual revelation suggests. He wonders if he was a habit of years, too, easier to give up when James was here in this so-different place. But he thinks of those emails and he knows that’s not fair. James has simply tried to get past his feelings for Robbie and make himself accept instead the friendship that had, after all, been all that Robbie had offered for years.

It just turns out to be a blow that he’s managed to do it.

Robbie’s going to have to take the friendship now, though, he can’t lose James altogether. That would be unthinkable. It’ll be less painful after a bit and he’ll enjoy being around James and his easy company again when James eventually comes back. If James eventually…

James has turned his head in the dark although Robbie can’t really see his face. “D’you want to go to the beach?”

“Do I want to what?”

“Before you go home. I still feel bad that you came all this way and you haven’t really seen anything. We could get out of the city and go to one of the islands along the coast.”

Robbie has no idea if he wants to go the beach. But he’s cued in by a touch of shyness in James’s voice as they sit on this step in the warm darkness, and this rapprochement of sorts is certainly better than the tension from earlier. They’re going to have to find some way to get back to how they used to be, and this unlikely offer could be the first step. Who knows. But an island—

“Shouldn’t you be staying nearer to the clinic for the moment?”

“I don’t have a check-up for another few days. And there’s even a medical centre on this island. Ko Samet, I was thinking of. It’s not all that far from the mainland. It’s east along the coast from Bangkok and more a weekend retreat for Thai people than a tourist island. It’s not that developed. It’s fringed with beaches, but then the whole central ridge of it is jungle.

Jungle? Robbie’s going to have to leave James and his slightly dubious self-preservation instincts to take care of himself in a few days, anyway. So it’s probably best not to say anything. But there’s an image of James on that bed in the clinic, mumbling in his distress and near unreachable, and another of him trying to brace his body to hide his tremors from Robbie when he was being overcome by chills—“You're not sleeping anywhere where a mosquito can get at you.”

“That’s most of this country out, then. Or the entire of Southeast Asia—”

“You’re still _not.”_  Well, so much for holding his tongue.

James is silent for a moment in the dark. “There’s no malaria on Ko Samet these days,” he says softly.

The sound of one of those small handbells starts to emerge from further along the dark street and then a bobbing light appears going past. Someone’s cycling a cart along with a particular foodstuff. They remind Robbie of the ice-cream carts of his youth but here there are portable charcoal burners in some of them. Different tones advertise different foods, he’s learnt. “Sticky rice,” murmurs James now, listening.

Robbie wonders if these small isolated tones ever put James in mind of the deeper, regular, steadier bells that resonate back in Oxford. James had often seemed to take pause for a moment and then move forward again a little less restlessly than was his usual wont when those bells sounded. Robbie used to fancy it might have been to do with the priest he had almost become.

But James is starting to describe various things that he's read about and he’s heard about from his teacher colleagues about this island, and there’s a touch more animation in his voice, so—

“Sounds dead nice,” Robbie agrees.

And James seems to relax a little, a little closer beside him now.


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

  _Ko Samet_

  

The bus is overly-cool the following day, but as it finally pulls clear of the sprawling city outskirts in the late afternoon, Robbie must succumb to the after-effects of their disturbed night. Because he wakes to find he’s slid right down with his head against James’s shoulder.

And there’s an arm resting around him, seeming to pull him in closer.

“Thought you were going to slide off the seat there,” James says. And he removes his arm, settling back into the confines of his own seat as Robbie sits up. Right. Of course.

It’s late enough when they finally reach the little port village that they eat there before taking the small passenger ferry.  And it’s dark enough on this cloudy night that by the time they reach the island it’s hard for Robbie to get a decent look at their surroundings as they make their way along the wooden pier and then along a low-lit, unpaved, winding path that’s been cleared through the scrub and the sand dunes.

James, having gone to secure their keys at one small bamboo hut, in the clearing where the path seems to end, hands one to Robbie and then moves towards the couple of long, shallow wooden steps up to the veranda of a small bungalow. The number that’s carved into the wooden key ring attached to the key in Robbie’s hand is different from the number on the door of James’s bungalow. He’s that serious about keeping Robbie at a distance that he’s booked them separate bungalows? Well, the prices are so low that that’s no reason not to. Robbie just wouldn’t have thought that—But then he catches sight of James’s pallor in the overhead light above the veranda. He must be exhausted. It seems best to just bid him goodnight and to head to Robbie’s own neighbouring bungalow. And he understands once he gets there. Because these are nothing like the beach villas in the British Virgin Islands, as Robbie should have realised from the dimensions.

Each bungalow is just an ensuite bedroom, the interior of which turns out to be very welcoming but dead simple—there’s an air-conditioned bedroom with neatly-finished wooden walls and floor and a cool tiled bathroom. The simple furniture is made of bamboo and so are the woven blinds, and the ceiling is high and pitched and seems to be made of bamboo poles too. He doesn’t feel much like venturing any further tonight, but it’s all right lying back on the very decently-sized bed, in the warm glow of the lamps, his attention vaguely and repeatedly drawn from his book by the sound of the sea which must be close by.

He just doesn’t realise quite how close until the following morning, when he emerges to find himself confronted by an implausibly blue body of water, swelling gently and glimmering at the end of a sandy path.

There’s nothing between James’s bungalow and the beach but the small knots of trees. There’s nothing between Robbie’s bungalow and the beach but James’s bungalow.

And James, sitting on his steps, in t-shirt and long shorts, elbows on his knees and face cupped in his hands, is regarding Robbie’s reaction with some amusement. “Would’ve given you this hut if I’d realised,” he says. Robbie’s glad he didn’t. He wonders how long James has been sitting there waiting for him. Watching the movement of the early-morning sea and looking better than he has done since Robbie first got here.

Breakfast is at a table right under those cajeput trees, as James informs him they’re called. He seems to have downloaded all sorts about this island on his phone and Robbie resigns himself to the string of information he’s going to be gently subjected to today. But there’s the faintest hint of a breeze making its way to them, the sun continues its slow climb in the sky, the breakfast is good and it’s damn nice to see James taking a proper interest in something again.

Heading down onto the beach and to two teak loungers under the shade of a large white parasol is even better. James drops down on the cushioned lounger with a sigh and closes his eyes briefly. He looks almost content. He must have been longing to get outside again after those two weeks within the confines of that white, artificial limbo of the clinic room that’s beginning to fade a little already now, in Robbie’s mind. This was a dead good idea to come here, for James, to get him out of the city if nothing else.

And now he’s just...Oh, bloody hell. “Want me to do your back?” Robbie finds himself offering as he realises James is emerging from his t-shirt, glancing at him, possibly catching Robbie watching him.

“Mmm,” James assents, and roots in his backpack for his sun cream. Then he slides over to sit on the end of Robbie’s lounger. “Thanks.”

Robbie swings his legs around to sit with his bare feet in warm sand and moves down closer to James’s bare back. The lotion that emerges is warm and liquid on his hands but so is James’s skin, already sun-warmed. Robbie tries to ensure he’s applying the sun cream with quick, sure strokes, not lingering, not flexing his fingers the way they seem inclined to want to when they reach James’s firm shoulders. He tries to focus on the sound of the waves and those bells from the food vendors wandering along the beach and on other people’s background voices from the water. And not so much on the feel of James under his hands. Because he’s never touched him quite so deliberately for so long.

He realises that his efforts to distract himself have failed, though, because his hands have somehow stilled, against James’s upper back. “Done?” enquires James, trying to look over his own shoulder. “D’you want me to do yours?”

No, Robbie does not. He’s always been strong and solid and now he may be trimmer from the allotment. All that time that he’s spent over the last few months shaping an odd corner of a plot with little-understood problems, trying to prepare it for future growth—it had almost been a welcome challenge to battle with. And it’s worked his own muscles in different ways, so he does feel more physically vital since leaving the force. And James may have already said so, obliquely, when Robbie first got here—but that doesn’t mean he looks anything like James in all his youth and lithe firmness.

He sees no help for it. “Sure,” he agrees, lifting his own t-shirt off with an inward sigh. Doesn’t matter anyway, does it? Any contrast between him and James. Doesn’t much matter at all any more. He swings around to sit on the other side of the lounger, and James’s hands arrive against Robbie’s back.

Then he forgets to feel self-conscious, because James’s hands are warm and his quick, adept movements are somehow gentle. It’s a pure pleasure, him doing this. And when he’s done, his touch lingers for a moment on Robbie’s shoulders, his hands just resting there almost as if—and Robbie stays quite still. James is quite still behind him too. Robbie starts to turn his head, just to see his expression. But—

“You should get a massage,” James suggests. “That’d release the tension. Your shoulders are quite tight?”

"Yeah. Well. Think I’ll be happy enough to stay on this beach for a while,” Robbie says after a short moment. “You go on and have your swim—”

“No, I mean you can have a massage on the beach, if you like.” And James nods over to a clump of trees in the sand. There are some of those straw mats spread out on the sand and, yes, people are getting a massage on the actual beach. Oh, that’s just the ruddy limit, isn’t it? This place—you can stay on the beach and virtually sleep on it, but in actual comfort, and massage sun cream into James’s firm back and it’s all incredibly clear seas and big blue domes of sky and warm white sand and just ruddy idyllic. And in a few days’ time he’ll go back to a grey and doubtlessly rainy Oxford and he’ll leave James back in that still-foreign city by himself. As James wants.

The universe appears to be cheerfully mocking Robbie in a very sunny, tropical fashion now.

And if that wasn’t enough, he now gets to watch James Hathaway’s long-limbed body in action, moving as if that’s what he’s been made to do. Christ, he can’t half swim well— _I used to row a bit._ Of course he can. Knowing James, he’d have to have landed up a bit more than competent, wouldn’t he, after all the time he must have spent on the water, and in it, doubtlessly, getting to that elite level when he’d been part of a team that won the boat race.

Although—where’s that particular blond head gone now? But James surfaces a distance from where he’d been, looking exhilarated, young and strong and well, and Robbie is hit by a surge of pure thankfulness for that. Hard as it’s going to be to leave him here, knowing how things could have been different, at least he’s leaving James on the road to recovery again. And having Robbie’s company over all that the long while in the clinic, maybe that’d helped.

It must at least be a better way to end things, for James, him making this decision for himself, to move on from Robbie. Rather than feeling that he’d never had the choice.

It’s a surprisingly short time before James returns, which is reassuring in that at least he’s having the sense not to over-exert himself. He seems almost intoxicated with all this sea breeze and wide open sunny space, but Robbie suspects that he must still be getting worn out fairly fast. James isn’t about to give in half so easily though. “Why don’t you come in the water?”

“Ah, I’m all right here with the book.” James’s glance falls on the closed book on the little wooden table beside the lounger. James, being James, is probably even able to assess that the bookmark, Robbie’s boarding pass from his outward journey, is arranged precisely as it was when he’d left Robbie here.

“Come on.” And there’s an outstretched hand. Robbie looks back up at him. There’s not a trace of mocking or impatience. Only gentle encouragement. He’s always hard to resist when he looks at you slightly hopeful like that. Sometimes Robbie suspects that that’s how he landed up with James in the first place—that little hopeful grin he’d sent over at Robbie right after Innocent had made her rather perturbed announcement that Sergeant Hathaway was insisting Robbie was given first refusal. Of him. Of James. He’d had enough sense not to refuse him back then, and then there must have been all sorts of hopeful smiles levelled at him that he’d missed. Until James gave up on giving them. And now Robbie gives in and gets up to follow James down the beach.

“Where are all the buildings?” Robbie asks, once they’re gently treading water, turned to face the shore. James was right, Robbie wouldn’t have wanted to miss striking out beside him through this welcome coolness and gently lifting sea.

“Behind the tree line. It’s the rule. This is a national forest park, you know. It’s protected—after a fashion.” So it should be. Extraordinary ruddy place.

Once James is eventually persuaded back out of his element, they collapse for a while, James rather happily, Robbie thinks. They stay on the beach for lunch after James goes off in search of a specific dish from some particular recommended nearby café, and Robbie’s going to have to have this green papaya salad again back in Oxford that he’d always ignored on the menu in Thai restaurants before. Unless it’s the surroundings giving such piquancy to all the flavours. But it’s not all that long after that before James is getting restless again. He’s really not the lounging on the beach type, is he? However much he tries. Well, nor is Robbie really.

“Do you want to go higher up to get coffee?”

Robbie sits up to look around him. “I think you can get one of those little ones somewhere near here—”

“Not the iced coffee. Hot.” Hot coffee? On a hot beach? “They have amazing coffee in one of the places up there, I read about in the guide. But they only turn on their generator in the afternoon to start doing dinner, so you can only get it then. If you want to—”

“Yeah, come on.” James obviously does. “Although—you’d probably like a last dip, wouldn’t you?” And it turns out that James would, with his return then cueing Robbie in to drop his book and start to pack up. His camera is still lying in the bottom of his small rucksack from his sightseeing efforts in Bangkok—“Laura said to tell you she wants pictures.”

“I’m sure she means of the scenery,” James says, slightly alarmed, as Robbie turns the camera in his direction.

“Oh, would you just get in there in front of that ruddy tropical ocean. You’ll add some—perspective—to it. I’ll tell her I couldn’t find a convenient palm tree.” Robbie even gets a slight grin for that just as he clicks the button.

There are more than enough trees a few minutes later.

“How far up exactly is this place?” he asks suspiciously as they set off. He wouldn’t put it past James to take him on a trek through the jungle in search of the perfect coffee.

“Oh, just a few minutes.” And he follows James up the steep and winding earthen path because the vegetation is already surprisingly lush and spills over to make it too narrow for two. It is only a few minutes. It’s only a few minutes of, incredibly, looking at James’s back again _,_ which thankfully is at least in a t-shirt now but bugger if James hasn’t pulled on the t-shirt while he was still sea-water damp and so it clings in places—and Robbie's going to be developing a thing for backs if he’s not bloody careful.

The coffee is certainly worth the walk. But then, so is the view.

“You want to come back up here and eat tonight?” Robbie asks, eyeing the menu on the board. Which does look good. “After you have a rest, I mean—” Well, James may want another early night, of course. Couldn’t blame him if he did.

James seems to have something else in mind, though. “If you want. Although I looked it up and—what are you smiling at?”

“You. Researching every last bit of this place. Of today. Right down to the coffee we’re drinking.” It’s been a damn good day in the end, really.

“Well, it’s just that—at night, down on the beach…”

 

 ===

 

The warmth embraces Robbie as he steps out of his cool bungalow, a few hours later, all the more welcome with his hair still slightly damp from his shower. He heads over to the next bungalow to pick James up.

James, on his veranda in the dusk, spotting him coming, steps back inside to turn off his interior light and reaches for something he sprays on his wrists and neck.

“What’s that stuff?” Robbie enquires from below, curious.

“Citronella. For the mosquitos. Deters them. D’you want some?”

“Shouldn’t you be using something stronger?” The mosquitos shouldn’t be James’s worst fear here. Laura’s going to kill him if she finds out he’s using ruddy citronella instead of the strongest insect-repelling chemicals known to mankind. Actually kill him. Although, given that Robbie is the one on the scene here, he could save her the prison sentence and murder James himself…

“This is what the Thais use—”

“And wouldn’t they have a bit more resistance than you? This? _This_ is what you used on your trekking?”

“No.” James looks down at him with an odd expression. “I used something DEET-based then. Just like Laura said I should in malarial areas…”

Oh. “All right then. Good.” Not that it’d worked, anyway…

James locks his door and comes down to join him, falling into step beside Robbie as they make their way around the trees to reach the wide sandy main path and then around the knots of people who have begun to form outside the restaurants and bars, perusing their options. All the half-open interiors look attractive, lit up as darkness gathers. But James keeps them going right to the end of the strip. Then he tugs Robbie’s arm briefly to get him to follow him along another little path. Oh, what’s he at this time? “Where’re you off to now—”

James says nothing, just leads him along this overhung path, their feet sounding on wood set in sand, as they cut through the clump of vegetation that signals the end of their beach.

And it’s immediately clear why James had wanted to stay down here tonight. Another whole long beach and the darkening sky spread along before them, in invitation. The waves hush gently at the shore’s edge. And this beach itself is transformed from what must surely be its more ordinary daytime self, lit in gently wavering patterns of light, with lanterns on sticks and candles in jars on small tables. And the scrub hedges, overhanging the path they’ve arrived on, extending on downwards to draw them both down towards that impromptu restaurant, are interspersed liberally with strings of tiny white lights.

“The beach. At night,” James intones seriously.

Robbie comes to a halt to take it all in. “This is—”

James turns his head to beam at him as if he might just have conjured this up by himself. Him and his little reveals and all his ruddy research. Robbie just stops himself in time from grasping hold of him in a rough half-hug.

“Fish, I suppose,” Robbie says, abstractedly, once they’re seated. “Haven’t had that over here yet and this seems the place for it—that’s what they’re barbecuing over there, is it?” It’s not his usual choice when out for a meal but he has no desire to focus on a menu by the flickering candlelight when he could be sitting absorbing this. There seems to be the shadow of a large moon rising. There are even lights in the rigging of a phalanx of boats spread across the horizon where the still-darkening sky meets the darker sea.

“Oyster boats,” James informs him, following Robbie’s gaze. “And you should get the fish,” he agrees. “Definitely.” There’s the slightest hint of a smirk. It’s probably cooked with lots of chillis and he thinks it’ll be too hot for Robbie. Well, he’ll be in for a disappointment. Robbie’s had a fair bit of practice recently.

That turns out not to be the source of James’s private amusement. When the fish arrives it’s presented a bit differently than Robbie’s expecting. It’s been gutted all right and cooked to gently steaming aromatic perfection, with chunks of its flesh and vegetables and herbs heaped back upon it. But it hasn’t been beheaded and it’s remarkably—

“He’s looking at me,” Robbie says, perplexed. He’s not used to dinner that gazes up at him.

James leans forward and stares gravely down at it. “Yes,” he agrees and then settles back and starts on his own beautifully presented fishcakes. With an actual appetite, Robbie is happy to see. Bloody smartarse though he is. Robbie draws a corner of his napkin over to evade the fish’s guilt-inducing glare so he can enjoy his own meal, eliciting a chuckle from James.

“Like covering a corpse’s face,” he reminisces.

Robbie studies him, in the candle’s flickering glow. It had been hard to tell, with him so ill when Robbie first got here, how much James had recovered while over here from the trauma and burnout that had precipitated him out of the job. But now that James is properly out of the woods and they’ve reached some sort of equilibrium again themselves, the way he’s been today has suggested to Robbie that maybe the time that James had spent over here before he was struck down by illness had been good for him. That it has been healing.

They linger for a little while in companionable silence when they’ve finished. That moon, almost full, has emerged and risen its way into the darkness. There’s the agreeable murmur of other diners’ conversations at neighbouring tables spaced out on the sand and there’s the constant low tones of the sea.

“What’s that big screen for?” Robbie asks eventually.

“They show films. We can sit here and have a drink if you like and just watch one."

“That what you want to do?”

“Not really. I think I’ve seen enough films to last me several lifetimes,” James says fervently. That must be true, poor bugger. And the thoughts of all those films that James had barely managed to concentrate on from that hospital bed remind Robbie that James really should be resting more.

“You have a good afternoon nap?”

James eyes him askance. “I’m much better, I don’t need a—I went for a _siesta._ Which was merely me observing a cultural tradition common in countries where high temperatures in the early afternoon can make maintaining a higher pace of activity prohibitively difficult—”

“You had a good nap,” Robbie decides.

James relaxes into his sudden grin. “I was up early,” he concedes. He had looked well settled already on those steps to his little veranda first thing this morning when Robbie had come out to find him.

“D’you want to go for a walk?” he asks Robbie suddenly.

 

===

 

They land up following that wooden path back to where it had begun. Then they’re drawn to wander straight down onto this unexplored far end of their own deserted beach. It’s lit by the illumination shining outwards from the main strip, but as they get closer to the sea and come to a slow halt, they move beyond the reach of that and into dimness. Robbie gazes out at the lights of those oyster boats and all the stars above them that had been invisible back in the city. They’d emerged far overhead in impossible numbers as he and James had sat over dinner.

It’s quite quiet down here despite the distant hum from the bars. There’s really just the sound of the waves. It’s quite easy to get lost looking out at those gently bobbing lights. Listening to the waves on the shingle and feeling the slight but very welcome salt-tinged breeze on his skin.

A hand slips into his.

Robbie turns his head.

James is standing there, just holding onto Robbie’s hand now. He looks right back at Robbie without moving. Robbie stares at him.

“Yes,” says James.

Yes? Yes to—what? But he doesn’t have time to work it out because James leans in and brushes a light barely-there kiss on Robbie’s mouth. Then he pulls back just far enough to regard Robbie again. But that’s as much as Robbie needs. He releases that hand in his and brings both hands up to bracket James’s neck, drawing him in closer again that last all-important bit. And this time James’s mouth is firm on Robbie’s, the kisses are repeated and then, as Robbie yields to it, it starts to develop into something else entirely.

Because Robbie, still unsure after all this time how much is allowed here, tries to hold back a bit at first, but James just doesn’t seem to want him to. He kisses Robbie thoroughly and urgently and when he stops for a moment he doesn’t pull back. He just mumbles _Robbie_ against Robbie’s own mouth and starts to kiss him again.

He smells of that citronella stuff and some sort of sharply-scented shower gel and of the sea this afternoon. And there’s a slight taste of salt when the side of Robbie’s mouth slides around to explore the side of James’s neck before James makes a soft noise and angles his head, recapturing Robbie’s mouth once more with his own. The thought of him on the beach this morning makes Robbie’s hands stray to feel those muscles in James’s back properly now, and then the shoulders and strong arms…James just lets him. He lets Robbie’s hands press his whole body in closer until he’s right against him now.

“Want to go back to my room,” he murmurs, almost a soft demand, and, luckily, all Robbie has to do is nod right against him that, yes, he wants that too, because that suddenly seems like the best idea ever. He feels James twine his hand back into his and tug it softly and he realises that they can of course walk along the shoreline and go back that way, that there’s no need to go back along the path, wending their way through people. He and James can just make their way back at the edge of the sea, not talking. James goes slightly in front but holding firmly onto Robbie’s hand and sending glances back at him. Robbie just watches him. He hears the waves, which seem louder now, like they’ve gathered a bit of force. He stays in step with James without needing to devote any effort to it. And he watches James. He watches him right up until the moment back in James’s bungalow when James has dropped down onto his bed and pulled Robbie down to lie beside him, and he’s kissing Robbie again.

Until there’s a sudden change in the background hum as a motor runs down, and it’s not just darker because Robbie is closing his eyes to submit to this, the lamp is dying, the last remnant of its light fading.

“Powercut,” mumbles James, barely pausing, “ignore it.” And he resumes. But then he’s stopping to tug at Robbie’s shirt and making quick work of the buttons, and he slides his hand down Robbie’s hip, asking permission. Robbie nods back at him in the dark and then starts to undo his own belt. James helps. He’s up off the bed briefly to shed his own clothes and then he’s back. His kisses are building in urgency now, on Robbie’s neck and around his collarbone, and he draws his fingers suddenly right down Robbie’s chest and stomach.

They don’t need any light. Now that’s it’s gone, the moon outside, utterly unconstrained by any intervening buildings, is casting more than enough light through the thousands of small gaps in those woven bamboo blinds. It must be an incredibly bright moon tonight. Or maybe it’s reflected from the surface of the sea, that distant-sounding rhythmic swell. There’s enough moving light in the room to see that James, as he moves his head now from the shadow of Robbie’s, is flushed.

He’s flushed, like he was when the heat of that fever had hold of him, and dishevelled like he was when he was distressed, but the look in his eyes now is completely different. He looks straight at Robbie, unflinching, like he sees him exactly and he wants only this. But his heart rate is going fast too. When he pushes himself up and drops down softly, covering Robbie with his weight, Robbie can feel it with James’s bare chest right against his own.

It takes a couple of attempts for Robbie get the words out. “You don’t think you should be taking it easier—”

“No,” James says. “No. Because I want to do—this.” And he’s sliding himself further down now, his hands already reaching, his head dipping—Bloody hell.

“It’s hot,” James says, out of the shadow he’s rolled over into when he’s finished, and Robbie is lying there, sated, shaken, utterly taken aback that James has it in his power to do this to him, to make him feel—well, he doesn’t quite remember the last few minutes clearly, but what he’d held onto amidst the dazed close darkness, the one ongoing sensation had been of James’s mouth, of James right there, responding to every sound that Robbie made, that dextrous mouth and tongue responding and gradually bringing Robbie right along with him.

And now James gets up off the bed and Robbie makes a noise of protest because he can’t just go after that—but he’s just reaching an arm under the blind to open the insect screen, push the window open and refasten the screen again.

And the sound of the waves immediately swells in volume. The tide must be racing on in. It _is_ hot now, the darkness and the silence from the air-conditioning unit make it seem doubly so. But James hasn’t actually raised the blind, which would be the sensible thing to do, to let any air in, which is giving Robbie hope that he might just—and he’s back, rolling onto the bed.

Robbie reaches for him. He’s not going to be able to do that yet, what James just did, not half a adeptly as James can—Christ—but he just wants to take hold of him and—James gives a little murmur of agreement as he feels Robbie’s hand take tentative hold, and it emboldens Robbie enough to start to explore with touch what might work here for James, what might bring James the kind of pleasure that Robbie badly wants to give him, to be the cause of.

When James rolls over half on top of him a moment later and puts his own hand briefly over Robbie’s, it becomes easier again to understand what he wants, and they’ve got all the time they need now to learn each other’s ways—or is this, on James’s part, is it just the one night? Robbie falters, unsure and there’s a definite noise of protest near his ear as James’s hand returns to touch against his, a more urgent request now. He doesn’t take any more control, though, despite the urgency, he wants Robbie to, so—Robbie lets his focus go back to him. And a moment later he can feel the distinct grin on his own face as James finally collapses beside him, in a patch of gently moving moonlight this time, breathless, thoroughly dishevelled, his eyes still moving rapidly, but looking quite undone.

“The best way to cool down now,” James mutters after a moment, still a little breathless, “would be to take a shower—”

“How’ll that work if there’s a power cut?” Robbie asks muzzily.

“There’s cold—won’t really be cold, it’s from a tank on the roof, heated by the sun all day.” It sounds blissful.

“You can first—” Robbie offers.

James raises his eyebrows at him. Oh.

And when he kisses Robbie in the dark bathroom, with that tepid water running from the showerhead on the wall, his quickened breathing is the only sound that Robbie hears. 

 

===

 

They sit on the platform of James’s veranda, bare feet on the warm wood of the bottom step, and James leans right against him, pressing his head against Robbie’s shoulder.

Robbie gets his arm around him.

The other bungalows stay agreeably quiet, their occupants presumably having sought the half-glimpsed intermittent lights of various bars further along which must have their own generators. The moon, at the height of its journey through that dark sky, casts a wavering path on the sea.

“I didn’t mean to keep confusing you, honestly,” James’s voice starts, after a while. “I just—I didn’t think I could go back to that—wanting you like that. It was so hard to make that break in the first place—”

“What changed your mind?”

“Well, you’re here,” James says, helplessly, lifting his head now to turn towards him. “And you just kept on _being_ here. It got too hard to keep pushing you away. I’d think of all the reasons why I couldn’t and shouldn’t let myself go down that road again and then—you’d just be back again, still _here._ You’ve always been so bloody persistent whenever I’ve really tried to push you away—most people would get insulted or wary and back off. You just watch me like all you’re concerned with is figuring out what’s wrong and setting the world back to rights again. I have to really burn my bridges with you before you ever leave me to my own devices. And even then you’re still—”

“Never thought me stubbornness would stand me in such good stead,” Robbie says a little shakily. “And I don’t mean—to push you into anything that you’re not sure you want—”

“But that’s just it—you’re just letting me—you're taking my cues and letting me sort it all out in my head and not pushing me—you let me turn you down and—Christ, I never imagined turning you down, but I _had_ to, I couldn’t even let myself think it might really happen—but you were going to let me go if that’s what I really wanted, weren’t you? You really wanted to do what was best for me…”

“Of course I do—”

“I’ve never had someone care so much about my welfare like that. I’m not even used to that, I couldn’t even get my head around it—”

“It’s all right, James. It’s really all right.”

“I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it last night and I got up to watch the sunrise. And I had a bit of space from—everything—just to think about it all.”

He’d needed a bit of his own space, away from being a patient monitored in a clinic. And even just a bit of space from Robbie, who would have been sleeping over there, oblivious to James sitting here battling his own thoughts. And then James had finally let it all hit him. And had somehow found peace after all in the thought that Robbie wanted him. Just as he’s slowly working his way to finding peace with Robbie, sitting here now.

“And then—it just got harder and harder—I couldn’t think of any reason not to any more. Any reason why I shouldn’t let myself have what I’d wanted for so long.”

He seems to run to a halt at last. Some of that joy in James today—that had been the resolution to this struggle. And Robbie sees now that he had been almost courted throughout the day himself, with all the little experiences that James had led him to and shared with him in this place. Until they’d reached the point where James had felt able to reach for him on that dark beach at last.

Robbie pulls him in a bit harder against his side. James drops his head right down to Robbie’s chest.

“It’s bloody impossible to stop caring for you,” James says in muffled tones after a while. “I did try.”

“Same, lad. Same.”

The lights begin to come slowly back to life, punctuating the darkness, each tiny bulb on the strings of light on the bushes swelling from a barely discernable dot to something steadier. The hum of the air-conditioning resumes behind them and the warm light of James’s lamp inside shines out through the blinds.

“Stay?” James asks, coming upright.

“You want to stay out here for a bit?”

“No. In my room. D’you want to stay tonight?”

“Course I do,” says Robbie gently. He’s such an odd mixture of audacious and unsure, you never quite know which way he’ll go next. “Be too far to walk back to mine anyway, wouldn’t it?” And he inclines his head at his own bungalow.

James gives a deep sigh and drops his head again, warm and heavy on Robbie’s shoulder. “All right,” he says on a yawn. Neither of them make a move.

The waves continue their ceaseless wash against the shore, a seemingly impermeable task. But they’re making inroads. They’re softening rough edges of rock into something smoother. Claiming more ground whenever they find a crumbling edge that’ll yield to them. Making slow progress, indiscernible over the years. You just can’t see it when it’s happening.

 

===

 

In the morning, Robbie wakes alone. But the blinds are up, there’s a white light seeping into the room, and there’s a shadowed presence through the insect screen. And Robbie has barely begun to push the sheets back to go out to him when the door is swinging open and James is back inside, dropping down on the bed.

“You sleep all right then?” Robbie checks, once he’s been thoroughly kissed good morning.

“Mmm.” James is not quite in conversational mood. He’s got other plans. “Mmm,” he says again, in more interested fashion, as he slides his head around to press a kiss to Robbie’s neck, his morning-rough cheek passing briefly against Robbie’s.

He had slept all right. Robbie knows that, really. James had barely seemed to stir any time Robbie had vaguely come to, right up until he must have taken himself out of Robbie’s arms shortly before Robbie finally woke properly. Robbie had held him all night. Him and his hot—but not too hot—head, against Robbie’s chest.

“Breakfast?” he suggests now. One thing he’d had brought home to him last night is that there really isn’t a pick of spare flesh on James’s bones. The weeks of illness have sapped any reserve he ever had, and he shouldn’t be missing a meal. Robbie reckons he’ll have a fairly good appetite himself, too. After the night that’s been in it.

“Spoilsport,” James grumbles. “All right. But only if we can come back here for a—siesta—later.” Sounds like a marvellous idea. Robbie’ll even happily call it a siesta in that case. “And resume where we’re leaving off,” James clarifies, not leaving anything to chance. It’s still hard to believe that he’s not just come around to this, but that he wants Robbie in this way as much as he does.

“I’m sure I can make that dressing,” James says, thoughtfully, once they’re seated under the shade of those cajeput trees. The low waves are cheerfully whitecapped this morning, in a sea that still looks warm enough to swim in again. And they have the whole day ahead of them. Together. “It’s more of a marinade in oil. If it’s really what you want to put on your omelette back in Oxford. Might be one of those things that taste better in a holiday setting.”

“What did you just say?”

“That it might be one of those things that taste better in a holiday setting.” James regards him innocently.

“Are you coming back to Oxford?” Right up until this moment, it wasn’t just that Robbie hadn’t known when. He still hadn’t known, deep down, if James really would. And the deeply rooted anxiety that was still there, underneath it all, now relinquishes Robbie gently from its grasp.

James, his eyes searching Robbie’s like he’s not half as confident as he’s trying to appear, just nods.

“You’re okay to leave—all this?”

“It’s like I said last night. On the beach. Yes.”

Robbie feels a grin start to overtake his features. James’s eyes light up in response.

"I’d like to finish up properly, though,” he qualifies after a moment. “Start the term at the school and just fill in until they find someone else. They’ve been really accommodating.” He always seems surprised that people want to keep him. And at the end of the day, he’d rather loved teaching at that school. Robbie can acknowledge that to himself, now that that thought doesn’t jab at him in further anxiety-provoking fashion.

“D’you want me to put out feelers when I get back, then—see what vacancies are available in the English language schools in Oxford?”

“No,” James says slowly. “Not—it wouldn’t be quite the same, I don’t think. And I was thinking more—I might like to try again. Go back to CID.”

“You would?” Robbie gets a sudden feeling that Laura would call this a wholly positive sign—James feeling a pull to go back to the work he’d been so good at before. Recognising that and feeling up to doing it again. “That’s great, lad.”

“In my next email to Innocent I could check out the idea.”

“You and Innocent _email_ each other? What on earth d’you say to her? Wish you were here?” Robbie can’t quite imagine it.

James rolls his eyes upwards but then gets briefly distracted watching some brightly-coloured small bird on a branch overhead. “Well—not quite,” he says, once his focus has returned to Robbie. “She just emailed me to ask how the teaching was going. I think she was still concerned that I mightn’t have made the best decision jacking it all in like that—anyway, then she started checking in with me every so often, wondering vaguely if I may be returning to Oxford. I’d be due another email shortly—God. Every four weeks, exactly, I think it’s been—do you think I’m on her monthly to-do list?”

He looks alarmed at the thought.

Robbie thinks he may well be—although not in the way that James is thinking. He’s well aware of exactly how disconcerted Innocent had been by the manner of James’s leaving. James will have continued to play on her mind amongst everything else she juggles. She’s probably just interspersed her deceptively-casual nudging campaign to get him back over regularly-scheduled intervals. Letting him know in her own way that he has a place to come back to. Robbie has to hand it to her. It isn’t the worst tack to take with James.

Giving him that bit of space.

And the thought of that, how James had struggled to even get to grips with Robbie telling him how he felt, how he’d badly needed to reach a calmer place before he could face the idea of this relationship becoming a reality, it makes Robbie speak up despite himself one last time.

“You seem happy here, though,” he says, gruffly, the words rather wrenched out of him. But he has to be sure that this is really what James wants.

“Well it’s still a holiday. And sunshine and beaches can only get you so far.”

“There won’t be much of them in Oxford.”

“There’ll be you. I don’t want holiday-us. I want everyday-us. I want to wake up next to you on mornings that you’re grumpy. Mornings in a grey November drizzle when I have to get up and I don’t want to go to work and the day has nothing to recommend it apart from you. That’s what I want.”

There’s a slight breeze, occasionally rustling the leaves of the tropical vegetation all around them. Small wisps of clouds drift gently across a sky that has layers of a paler blue in it today and the sunlight dances agreeably on the water. And yet here’s James saying that he still wants to come back to Oxford. Because Robbie is trying hard to listen to him properly now, in as many ways as he can manage. And he’s pretty sure that even beyond those words the look that’s pulling straight at his heart across this small café table is telling him that James means exactly what he’s saying.

_Epilogue. Oxford in November._

 

It’s a grey, miserable morning in Oxford. It’s not raining yet, but it might as well be. It’s the wrong end of the year, sufficiently dark that bedside lamps have to be groped for and clicked on in the morning when an alarm clock sounds. 

Although it’s neither an alarm that Robbie’s set nor what he’d call an alarm clock, exactly. It’s music from an ipod that’s been inserted in a speaker that James had reclaimed from his possessions in the spare room. And he’s insisting on calling it a dock. But he’d seemed to want the set-up, detouring to find it, last thing last night, going briefly absent without leave between bathroom and bedroom. And when Robbie had come up behind him and placed a curious head over James’s shoulder as he’d rooted in one of those boxes, James had simply contorted to lay a kiss on his cheek and then returned to his search, murmuring something about _may as well_ _be waking up to music if I’m going to wake up with you._

James drops a restraining arm across Robbie now and shifts himself over a little closer in the warm bed.  Just in case Robbie had been thinking of going anywhere. “Five minutes…” he mumbles into Robbie’s shoulder.

He’d had enough trouble getting a flight, at short notice after he’d finally finished up, that he’d only made it back last night. At the eleventh hour. Robbie had had only a bit less trouble wangling a slight change of date in the flight that he’d originally confirmed to come home. That extra week he’d stayed on with James in Bangkok, before James had started that final stint of teaching—that had been bloody worth it, though.

“You really reckon you should risk keeping Herself waiting?” Robbie murmurs in his ear now. “Your first morning back?” But he gets an arm under James to tuck him against his own side for the few minutes they have left. Innocent, James has informed Robbie wryly, has apparently cleared time in her schedule first thing this morning to have _a useful discussion about a number of issues, going forward,_ _as a reorientation_ _to the job._

Robbie had grimaced sympathetically at James’s dry recital of her summation. But he privately reckons she’s not taking any chances on letting James’s welfare slip through the cracks of the demands of the job again. She’s going to get it across to James just what processes are in place that he should avail of, if the need arises. Which will be a task that Robbie doesn’t actually envy her. But she’s also making it clear just how much she considers that a priority by not letting James properly set foot in her nick until she’s had her—discussion.

She’d been plainly delighted to get an email from James making tentative enquiries. Her reply had come when Robbie had still been in Bangkok. She’d promptly taken to reframing James’s resignation as an extended leave of absence. And she’d extracted her pound of flesh in a guarantee that he’d go for promotion to inspector at last.

Then she’d caught Robbie by surprise by phoning yesterday, ostensibly for administration purposes. “Just checking that Sergeant Hathaway’s details are in order, Robbie—you’re down at this number as his emergency contact?” Robbie had found that the flimsiest of pretexts—he’d have thought she could do much better, actually—and he’d been immediately suspicious.

“And how _is_ retired life treating you?” she’d enquired, with great interest. “You don’t find it lacking in excitement? I seem to have heard something about you heading off to Thailand at the drop of a hat?” Oh, Christ. While there was technically nothing to stop a returning officer like James from being in a relationship with another ex-copper, Robbie just hadn’t wanted him to have to deal with that while he got used to being back. Back in Oxford and the nick. Back here with Robbie. The last thing they needed at this stage was—“I only ask as there are plenty of training or consultancy opportunities open to a man of your experience—” Oh. And Robbie, in his relief, had almost missed the mutter of “Although, God help me if you pass your own unique working methods onto the new generation.”

“What?”

“I may be the one taking early retirement if there’s a batch of new recruits with your particular modus operandi wreaking cheerful havoc around Oxford and making smoothing ruffled feathers a full-time job in its own right.”

“Ma’am—”

“Jean, Robbie, please. You’re retired after all. You’ve left all that behind now. For good. Haven’t you?”

Ruddy woman. “I’m not actually looking to—”

“Of course. Of course. Just making small talk, really. Do enjoy your day. Laura Hobson tells me that you’re currently spending time on your allotment. Mr Innocent has been contemplating taking up that gentle hobby. Good stress relief, is it? I must hear more about that the next time we talk.” _Christ, Laura_. And what was that? Next time?

There’s no way that Robbie’s telling James about that call. He’ll be far too amused for his own good. At the thought that Innocent, probably spurred on by her success in re-securing James, has now turned her focus onto Robbie.

James, nudging his head back to look at Robbie properly now, may be ahead of him there. “Definitely shouldn’t keep her waiting,” he agrees, sleepily. And without making the slightest move to get up. “Shall I give her your regards?”

“You do that.”

“And when she asks after you—”

“I told you, I’m not coming back.”

James assumes a thoughtful expression. “That sounds familiar. I think I said something like that once. Maybe quite recently…”

“Oi.”

“Oh, it was to _you,”_ James says in an inspiration-strikes tone. “I thought I’d dreamt that. Especially the whole idyllic island part—”

“No. Look.” And Robbie reaches his free hand behind his own apparently-defunct alarm clock for a framed photograph that James, with other things uppermost in his mind last night, had failed to notice. He’ll need to brush up on his observation skills. But they had been rather distracted when they got to the bedroom…

James is taken sufficiently by surprise that he goes silent for a moment. “That’s—”

“You. Yeah.”

James eyes the picture of himself, an unreadable expression on his face. “You had that one printed that off on proper photo paper,” he says eventually. “And you put in a frame—I don’t think anyone has had a photo of me—you know only of me, to look at—”

Robbie finds, as he tends to find since James has started to let him in that bit more, that these little revelations are hard to face. Or rather what he’s always suspected is behind them. James didn’t get to be James for no good reason. He has a strong inkling that James’s warm kind-heartedness and loyalty are all despite, not because of, what he’s gone through in his early life. And he’s not about to let James, who needs to feel free to let Robbie know these little telling details whenever he can, see his difficulty. He tightens his arm around him instead. “Missed you while you were finishing up, didn’t I?”

He doesn’t say that back in his quiet flat, as the end of Autumn ceded to Winter, he had needed the reassuring evidence of that picture of James, whole and well and on the path to good health again.

James grins at him innocently. “ _Did_ you? Did you miss—this? Did you look at my picture and think of doing—”

“You’re really going to be late, you know.”

“Be worth it…”

“You want to stand in front of Innocent while she gives you her little welcome-back assessing speech and think about why you’re late?”

“I do, yes. That’s exactly what I want to be thinking about.”

“You’re a braver man than me, Inspector Hathaway.”

“Sergeant.”

“Won’t be that for long. Going to have to make the most of calling you me sergeant again now while I can. Although—you’re not my sergeant, of course.”

“No. I think I am,” says James agreeably. “Yours. And—you know she’s going to wear you down and get you back now. Resistance is futile.”

“You’re just sayin’ that cause you gave in first—”

James’s mobile starts up on what’s going to be his side of the bed, prompting him to detach himself from Robbie and push himself upright. It soon becomes apparent that it’s Innocent’s PA, although James’s expression is hard to read as he murmurs polite agreement into the phone. When he terminates the call, he returns the phone to the bedside table and looks down at Robbie questioningly. “There’s some sort of development in some big ongoing case? And Innocent is doing a press conference?”

“That’s Peterson’s case. They did one last week. Must be doing another joint one.” Robbie wonders why Innocent is not quite willing to unleash Peterson unsupervised, in all his smooth, affable presentability, on an unsuspecting TV public. Is she uneasy about his handling of matters like this? It’s a tricky balance, dealing with the press on a sensitive case when they’re trying to push your buttons.

“Oh, excellent. I’ve missed him.”

“You’ve missed Peterson?”

“I mean—in the sense that we can watch him on TV later. And heckle him from the privacy of your couch.”

“What?”

“Well—my first day back has apparently been rescheduled. Until tomorrow.”

“It has?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s—just terrible,” says Robbie, after a pause.

“Terrible,” agrees James.

“So you don’t have to go in today—”

“She sent her sincere apologies.” He slides back down into the bed and turns on his side, stretching luxuriously, flexing right against Robbie. “I can make us breakfast,” he offers. “Omelettes. Shall I make a chilli dressing for yours? It should marinade for a while, really…”

“Are you hungry?” James shakes his head. “Let’s just stay here, for a bit, then, yeah?”

Robbie turns his head to look at that picture taken on a Thai island as James settles his own head a bit more comfortably on Robbie’s chest, where, Robbie had discovered during that week in Bangkok, he most likes to lie.

He looks at James in the photo sending him that quick grin at Robbie’s teasing in the middle of that day when everything had finally changed for them. Then he looks at James _—_ or what he can see of him now—the top of the blond head on his chest as James presses in in drowsy contentment.

There’s that beach of almost-white fine sand in that picture that had been so warm when your bare feet furrowed into it. There’s a sea that had been impossibly clear and yet a startling blue, even when set against that wide expanse of sky, when you sat at a small café table together under a cajeput tree and just watched it gently swell.

The rain finally starts up against the window. It’s still so grey and dim that it’s hard to know whether it’s the early hour or the weather that means they’ll leave the lamp on for a while in the cosiness of this room. James surrenders a little further into Robbie’s hold. And Robbie reckons that they’re both quite happy where they are. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In one of those serendipitous fanfic circles-of-motivation, I was given a push to continue with this fic after it had stalled by Evenlodes_Friend’s wonderful, lyrical fic “Are You for Me?” which took me by surprise as a giftfic and sees James’s return from backpacking (it’s hard to do it justice with the summary). Once I had recovered from seeing my name and “South East Asia” on the board—my initial fear obviously being that I had posted an unfinished draft of this in my sleep—I was most touched to be jointly-given such a fic. And while this then stalled again and needed the kick of a fast-approaching season 8 to get it finally done, Evenlodes_Friend encouragement to continue with it when I told her of its premise was very much appreciated.


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